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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

#111

Post by deepnotderp »

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"

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

#112

Post by angry_octet »

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…

My counterexample to this would be CUDA. It is so much more successful than OpenCL (for many reasons) and so much carefully tuned library code and dev tools exists for CUDA, that choosing other options is only done for mobile platforms, where a duplicate port is required.

It is conceivable that a company like WD could implement a linux BSP and pay for ports/tuning of high level tools, but it would be a significant task.

The performance analysis of synchronous systems like MPI and map reduce over 4k cores is relatively obvious, but for next generation data intensive tasks and asynchronous compute it isn't.

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

#113

Post by kindfellow92 »

nabla9 wrote: post #39
pkaye wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#114

Post by tyingq »

ksec wrote: post #110
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.

Is this confirmed though? Were they using ARM? ( Proberly, but may not be in everything they use ) Are they switching over from ARM? Or simply moving their inhouse controller to RISC-V? The one time license fee were suppose to be a lot cheaper if you are shipping in billions of unit. Because if they are switching from ARM, I think of it as ARM being lazy and not winning the battle they ought to win, purely from a bus…

See this: https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacki...

Not definitive for the whole product line, but at least evidence of one popular WD drive with a Marvell/ARM controller. Google "Western digital Marvell" for more...like https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marvell-achieves-si... (over one billion WD units with Marvell/ARM chips on board)

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

#115

Post by frankharv »

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.…

FreeBSD has been in the works since 2016...

[0]https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv

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

#117

Post by wtallis »

tyingq wrote: post #114
ksec wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this confirmed though? Were they using ARM? ( Proberly, but may not be in everything they use ) Are they switching over from ARM? Or simply moving their inhouse controller to RISC-V? The one time license fee were suppose to be a lot cheaper if you are shipping in billions of unit. Because if they are switching from ARM, I think of it as ARM being lazy and not winning the battle they ought to win, purely from a bus…

See this: https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacki... Not definitive for the whole product line, but at least evidence of one popular WD drive with a Marvell/ARM controller. Google "Western digital Marvell" for more...like https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marvell-achieves-si... (over one billion WD units with Marvell/ARM chips on board)

Western Digital's SanDisk SSDs almost exclusively use Marvell controllers, too.

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

#118

Post by jabl »

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…

> That, and I'm kind of disappointed everyone has drunk the RISC kool-aid.

Well, the thing is, RISC "won" the "RISC vs. CISC" wars, in the sense that more or less every ISA designed since has been RISC [1]. Of course, CISC also won in the sense that x86 is still around, and Intel is of course fabulously successful. So at least for high-end cores designed with a big budget, the extra decoder complexity doesn't appear to hurt that much. But if you're doing a new ISA from scratch, no need to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Now, one can always hope that something better comes around. I'm not particularly hopeful that stack machines would be it; Forth has been around for how many decades now, if it would be such a good idea I think it would have already made its breakthrough. But there's plenty of research-y stuff out there (I admit to not being very familiar with most of it). Such as asynchronous (clock-less) logic, non-binary (ternary) logic, Mill(?), reversible computing, dataflow architecture, neuromorphic computing, quantum computing, graph reduction machines, and whatnot.

[1] In the sense of

- Load-store architecture

- fixed-length instructions (yes, ARM thumb and RISC-V C slightly break this, but still)

- ISA designed primarily as a compiler target rather than for human ASM programmers.

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

#119

Post by pjmlp »

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.…

In the context of JIT, there is ongoing work to port at least OpenJDK and JikesRVM.

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

#120

Post by pjmlp »

tzahola wrote: post #61
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.

>CISC's bullied them away and we've been stuck in Intel's quagmire every since You know that ARM means Advanced RISC Machine, right?

In the early days.

ARMv8-A 64 has gotten a bit CISC.

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