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Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

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Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#21

Post by pjc50 »

phkahler wrote: post #18
0xFFC wrote: post #2

This was what I exactly predicted one year ago. Risk-V ISA is coming for all of them{x86,arm,mips}. And this is very smart move by WD to jump into Risk-V wagon. Update: Why do people downvote? I honestly don’t understand.

>> Why do people downvote? Because they can't handle the fact that you're right. RISC-V is coming for all of them. I like your phrasing too, it's accurate but I guess people think it's more pretentious. Only time will tell for sure.

There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this. It's like Linux on the desktop: doable but very much a fringe thing.

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#22

Post by garmaine »

sverige wrote: post #6

I haven't been following the RISC-V story too closely, possibly because I didn't want to get my hopes up only to be dashed. From the article, it sounds like these cores will be developed solely for use in data storage. Can someone with more knowledge tell whether this will help provide the kind of production volume needed to make consumer products (like laptops and desktops) more likely to be viable? Are general purp…

You should read up on SiFive.

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#23

Post by jstewartmobile »

I guess this will be nice for industry, which may pass the savings along to the consumer, but as far as having auditable hardware that you have some control over, I don't see how this is any better than the ARM SoCs we already have--unless you're going to roll your own system on an FPGA.

That, and I'm kind of disappointed everyone has drunk the RISC kool-aid. I think a lot of RISC "performance" has more to do with compilers catering to the least common denominator than anything else. If you had a language/compiler that took better advantage of a stack architecture, or even a CISC architecture, the performance would probably be just as good if not better.

I was particularly impressed by Baker's old paper[0] on stack architectures in service of his Linear Lisp idea.

[0] http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ForthStack.html

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#24

Post by garmaine »

guelo wrote: post #16
wmf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whether this will help provide the kind of production volume needed to make consumer products (like laptops and desktops) more likely to be viable? It probably won't, despite a lot of wishful thinking to the contrary. Are general purpose chips likely to be one result of the development of RISC-V, or have I missed something fundamental? Out of the whole RISC-V ecosystem it looks like only SiFive is working on that, so…

The announcement does say "we are providing all of our RISC-V logic work to the community." Whatever that means.

It means essentially “open source,” its just that this time the source code is in a hardware definition language.

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#26

Post by topspin »

0xFFC wrote: post #2

This was what I exactly predicted one year ago. Risk-V ISA is coming for all of them{x86,arm,mips}. And this is very smart move by WD to jump into Risk-V wagon. Update: Why do people downvote? I honestly don’t understand.

Yes, this mod behavior is pretty astonishing. microcolonel's comment is getting downvoted as well for no apparent reason.

I guess there are RISC-V haters...? Good grief.

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#27

Post by garmaine »

H99189 wrote: post #4

I like the idea behind RISC-V's open architecture but I had a question. Does it do or even try to do anything about the cloud of uncertainty surrounding Intel ME and the AMD equivalent in x86?

There is a security working group. If you are concerned about this I highly recommend joining the foundation as an individual (or getting your employer to join), and asking to be put on that WG.

It’s a critically important question and it requires active grassroots involvement to make sure that we don’t end up with a mere clone of ME, or worse a “better ME.”

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#28

Post by csense »

From the headline, I would guess WD is putting a user accessible CPU in each of their disk drives, idea being that if you have a CPU living close to the drive, then e.g. map+reduce workloads can be more efficiently executed. Instead of going with ARM or Intel, I guess the CPU's are using some less famous architecture called RISC-V.

Then I read the article, and the article is so full of buzzwords and genericisms that after reading the whole thing, I don't know if this guess is correct.

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#29

Post by garmaine »

pjc50 wrote: post #21
phkahler wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why do people downvote? Because they can't handle the fact that you're right. RISC-V is coming for all of them. I like your phrasing too, it's accurate but I guess people think it's more pretentious. Only time will tell for sure.

There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this. It's like Linux on the desktop: doable but very much a fringe thing.

Why is it any more fringe than, say, hoping for an ARM laptop?

Re: Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year

#30

Post by pkaye »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #23

I guess this will be nice for industry, which may pass the savings along to the consumer, but as far as having auditable hardware that you have some control over, I don't see how this is any better than the ARM SoCs we already have--unless you're going to roll your own system on an FPGA. That, and I'm kind of disappointed everyone has drunk the RISC kool-aid. I think a lot of RISC "performance" has more to do with co…

RISC-V benefits is mostly an open source license that is free of patents. I think the biggest reason for it is academic... there needs to be an open platform for academic research. I'm sure it is next to impossible for an average university to do that on ARM or x86 architecture.
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