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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

#51

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

Hard drives already have moderately powerful processors in them. So there's no reason to assume any change in feature set.

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

#52

Post by 0xFFC »

s-macke wrote: post #48
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.

Even though I see no reason to vote you down, there are a lot of reasons not to vote you up. The message from WD is very good news for RISC-V. But to make the claim that it overthrows all other architectures from the throne is not only a bit daring. With this logic, ARM should have crashed Intel a long time ago. There will always be a market for different architectures. You have also misspelled RISC-V, indicating tha…

Did you read even my comment?

Where did i claim this?

>ut to make the claim that it overthrows all other architectures from the throne is not only a bit daring

It is always fascinating how much people do extrapolate when the want to believe something. It is going to overthrow and it is overthrown is two quite different thing if you can think critically.

>You have also misspelled RISC-V, indicating that you are not really aware of the market and architecture

Again. This just like you other analysis, which is based on flawed logic and not being intelligent enough.

Rest assured I have wrote enough Chisel, and I would bet I am more familiar about interenal of most architecture than most people in topic (since my grad school work is focused on outputing chisel via LLVM).

One extra lesson for you: dont extrapolate and judge based on appearance. Look at what they are saying deep down.

And don’t based your judgement on spelling, particularly in unofficial context. Some people only have time to comment when they ar in bus or something.

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

#53

Post by milesf »

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.

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

#54

Post by zokier »

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…

> Western Digital plans to transition future core, processor, and controller development to the RISC-V architecture. The company currently consumes over one billion processor cores on an annual basis across its product portfolio. The transition will occur gradually and once completely transitioned, Western Digital expects to be shipping two billion RISC-V cores annually

I think that paragraph captures pretty well what they are doing; basically swapping out their current (proprietary) cores for RISC-V cores. I don't see any indication that the processors would be any more user accessible than current controllers. Considering the numbers presented, simply doubling the number of cores seems fairly conservative estimate, they will probably do that without any major paradigm shifts.

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

#56

Post by zokier »

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.

RISCV is pretty far from attacking Intel anywhere. ARM is the one that should be both worried about RISCV and simultaneously be a cause of worry for Intel.

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

#57

Post by phkahler »

wmf wrote: post #35
garmaine wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ARM laptops already exist BTW using smartphone SoCs. The R&D has already been done and paid for. A RISC-V server or desktop processor would have to be created essentially from scratch.

>> A RISC-V server or desktop processor would have to be created essentially from scratch.

I'd love to see AMD or Intel build a chip on the RISC-V instruction set and use all their existing infrastructure around that. I would not be surprised it they could achieve higher benchmark performance than their x86 offerings. For someone else to achieve the same level of performance will take a while, but there are multiple groups working on it.

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

#58

Post by ansible »

garmaine wrote: post #29
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are a few ARM based Chromebooks. In many cases, it isn't too hard to put regular Linux on them.

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

#59

Post by sjburt »

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…

It doesn't seem so. I think they're just switching the internal processors that do LBA translation, error correction, bad-block marking etc over to RISC. And then their marketing department took that decision and ran with it in a completely different direction.

The key line is "... transitioning its own consumption of processors – over one billion cores per year – to RISC-V."

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

#60

Post by zokier »

ac29 wrote: post #33
garmaine wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read up on SiFive.

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.

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