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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

#81

Post by microcolonel »

milesf wrote: post #53

I remember RISC's back in the late 80's/early 90's. CISC's bullied them away and we've been stuck in Intel's quagmire every since. Anytime there's an attack on the status quo, the established players feign concern and beat back the attack then return to the way things were (remember Negroponte's $100 laptop and the netbook response?) No idea how this will pan out.

After microcoding, this is all silly. What matters is how efficiently you can encode and communicate the μ-ops to the ROB. RISC-V, with the C extension (and using only today's nascent compiler backends!), has more-or-less the same μ-op density as x86-64 (with a good order of magnitude or two less complexity in the decoder), and considerably better density than AArch64, which completely lacks reduced width instructions.

It's not that CISC won, it's that CISC (eventually) didn't lose to any great degree.

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

#82

Post by microcolonel »

anderspitman wrote: post #47
microcolonel wrote: post #3

I think the level of industry enthusiasm for RISC-V is so palpable, in part, because the messaging from day one has been unequivocally: RISC-V will be the standard ISA for every form factor, in every market. Can't wait to put a RISC-V SBC in my ThinkPad X220 chassis. :- )

I'm so excited that we're feasibly within a year or two of being able to develop embedded devices in Rust[0] on RISC-V microcontrollers [1] running on open source RTOSes also written in Rust[2]. It's currently already possible but still requires quite a bit of hacking. Plus the RF stacks (Bluetooth in particular) aren't there yet. What a time to be a developer. PS RISC-V on my X220 wouldn't hurt either. [0] http://bl…

> I'm so excited that we're feasibly within a year or two of being able to develop embedded devices in Rust[0] on RISC-V microcontrollers

I'm happy to report that the future is yesterday![0][1] (sort of)

> Plus the RF stacks (Bluetooth in particular) aren't there yet.

Espressif is a RISC-V foundation member, and you know what that means. (hint: it rhymes with could-pie den-sill-hiccup)† :- )

[0]: https://abopen.com/news/rust-comes-risc-v/ [1]: https://github.com/dvc94ch/hifive

† «Goodbye Tensilica» (sorry Tensilica, I have nothing against you!)

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

#83

Post by kijiki »

technofiend wrote: post #50

I haven't dug through all the marketing speak yet but this seems like it's tangentially related to WD's He8 converged servers they've been sampling, which were ARM-based and ran Debian Jessie. [0] Although when I saw them spoke about in Redhat Summit of course they were mooted to be running RHEL. It would be interesting to see if WD Labs is now sampling RISC-V-based boards running Redhat and Ceph OSD software which l…

I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumulus Linux switches.

The idea was that you'd run the Ceph monitors on the switches, and the OSDs on the hard drives, and you'd have an entire storage array with no servers needed. Was very neat, but pointless unless you can buy the drives...

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

#84

Post by eroccatlun »

tyingq wrote: post #70
Symmetry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to move the reader head inside your drive and to communicate with the host CPU you need microprocessors in your hard driver, really tiny ones. Now, instead of paying ARM for licences to use them WD is using open source processors that don't come with fees besides what it takes to manufacture them.

This is the right answer...they already use ARM, they want a one-time-fee license instead of royalties. Trying to shave a little margin.

Sounds ... RiskV.

YYYEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

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

#85

Post by ficklepickle »

eroccatlun wrote: post #84
tyingq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right answer...they already use ARM, they want a one-time-fee license instead of royalties. Trying to shave a little margin.

Sounds ... RiskV. YYYEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

Was I supposed to see the CSI Miami guy when I read that?

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

#86

Post by mhayenga »

asb wrote: post #55

If you're interested in what's going on at the RISC-V Workshop, you might want to follow my live blog here: http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/11/seventh-risc-v-workshop-...

You really do an amazing job writing these up. Back when I used to work at ARM and attended the 3rd workshop, I ended up just pointing people to your write-up rather than my own notes.

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

#87

Post by AnimalMuppet »

0xFFC wrote: post #75
s-macke wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried to explain to you why your message might have been down voted. Nothing else. If I interpret your message that way, others will do the same.

I know ( and i upvoted both of your comments) No hard feelings ;) But i have a right to defend my comment.

Free tip: If you don't want to be downvoted for your comment (#3) defending your comment (#1), don't say in comment #3 about the person who wrote comment #2 that their analysis was based on not being intelligent enough. That's a personal attack, and is absolutely downvote-worthy.

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

#88

Post by fasquoika »

zokier wrote: post #60
ac29 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically their Freedom products [0], which are multicore, 1GHz+ CPUs, with support for standard interfaces like PCIe 3.0, USB 3.0, GbE, DDR3/4.... and ship with Linux support. Not about to disrupt Intel, AMD, or ARM in the laptop/desktop/server space just yet, but relatively high performance, modern RISC-V SoCs are definitely out there. [0] https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/

> and ship with Linux support Just to point out that they are not actually shipping that fancy HW yet, with or without Linux support. It might materialize one day, but that day is not today.

They do have a way to set up FPGAs for it though, so it's clearly not entirely vaporware

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

#89

Post by sitkack »

kijiki wrote: post #83
technofiend wrote: post #50

I haven't dug through all the marketing speak yet but this seems like it's tangentially related to WD's He8 converged servers they've been sampling, which were ARM-based and ran Debian Jessie. [0] Although when I saw them spoke about in Redhat Summit of course they were mooted to be running RHEL. It would be interesting to see if WD Labs is now sampling RISC-V-based boards running Redhat and Ceph OSD software which l…

I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumulus Linux switches. The idea was that you'd run the Ceph monitors on the switches, and the OSDs on the hard drives, and you'd have an entire storage array with no servers needed. Was very neat, but pointless unless you can buy the drives...

WD could easily take on Intel and AMD for datacenter workloads if computation starts moving to the drives. Drives have mass causing more Data Gravity. Data Gravity is literally money.

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

#90

Post by sitkack »

Symmetry wrote: post #42
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…

Probably we won't be seeing RISC-V application processors for quite a while. There's a lot of stuff that can just be recompiled but there's also a lot of hand-tuned assembly that goes into making a JIT or media codec fast. That's why we're seeing initial adoption in the embedded space, where either there's just a small amount of code to recompile or you were going to rewrite the assembly anyways for the next product.…

You can already run Debian [0] RISCV.

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V

https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux

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