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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

#121

Post by hawski »

microcolonel wrote: post #38
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…

> Out of the whole RISC-V ecosystem it looks like only SiFive is working on that, so it will take time. If you look at Qualcomm's strategy with x86 competition (using Dynamic Binary Translation), it's not hard to imagine that they might consider building RISC-V application processors; especially once they've proven their ability to deliver enough compatibility and performance with DBT to compete on ISAs for which the…

Can Qualcomm do that? Tegra K1 from nVidia was supposed to be x86 in similar way. They couldn't get a license so it became an ARM core.

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

#122

Post by baybal2 »

csense wrote: post #28

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…

I was wondering, why they launched a huge recruitment campaign in Shenzhen for IC developers recently. I never saw them being big at chipmaking.

Now things got clear, they were hiring staff for that.

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

#123

Post by mrweasel »

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. :- )

Sadly I doubt that anyone will make RISC-V motherboard with PCIe slots, or in any other way supply hardware that will make it easy to build a RISC-V workstation. We aren't seeing any ARM workstations and PowerPC boards aren't exactly affordable.

The market for these processors aren't workstation or laptop, there simply aren't enough of us willing to buy them.

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

#125

Post by rijoja »

deepnotderp wrote: post #111
rijoja wrote: post #109

Well what I find interesting here is if they are able to manufacture chips with 7nm litography. Aren't intel and samsung who I belive to be the leaders in the field, still at 14 nm? In case WD manages to beat them to the market with this technology at least there will be a lot of hype around this. As far as binary compability is concerned this is more or less a thing of the past. The way I see it js and other interpr…

"Well what I find interesting here is if they are able to manufacture chips with 7nm litography. " They're going to be using TSMC "7nm". At this point nm node names from anyone mean absolutely nothing. Just know that TSMC "7nm" ~= Intel "10nm"

Aha thank you for clearing that out.

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

#126

Post by adrianN »

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…

I believe the "we just need a better compiler" thing has been tried with e.g. Itanium and turned out to be harder than expected.

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

#127

Post by ProblemFactory »

csense wrote: post #28

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…

> 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.

I don't see how this would be better than our current systems architecture. Is the interconnect between the disk drive and the main CPU/memory really the bottleneck?

Even if the CPU lives inside the disk drive case, it would still be limited by the same read/write speeds as a CPU 20cm away.

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

#128

Post by windlessstorm »

Symmetry wrote: post #45
csense wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Tiny microprocessors are there in almost all devices supporting DMA since long time right? So what this RISC-V versions will bring new to the table?

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

#129

Post by runeks »

windlessstorm wrote: post #128
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.

Tiny microprocessors are there in almost all devices supporting DMA since long time right? So what this RISC-V versions will bring new to the table?

> So what this RISC-V versions will bring new to the table?

Not much, except being open, so WD can produce them without paying anyone royalties.

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

#130

Post by hajile »

kindfellow92 wrote: post #113
nabla9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V is just ISA. I don't think ISA's can be patented. Just some specific instructions.

ISAs can be patented. Intel is patenting their latest AVX/SSE instructions.

ISA spec is copyrighted. Instructions aren't patented directly. Instead, the best ways of implementing them are patented.
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