Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wdc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 149 posts

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

#61

Post by tzahola »

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?

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

#62

Post by astrodust »

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.

It wasn't that CISC won or that RISC lost, it was that the architectures got so blurry you couldn't tell one from the other. There's so much microcode in a CPU now that the instruction set is just the icing layer on the cake. Internally there's surprising amounts of commonality between PowerPC, ARM and x86 type chips.

Plus PowerPC started to adopt CISC-like instructions, x86-64 started to adopt RISC-like features such as having a multitude of generic registers, and here we are where nobody cares about the distinction.

Don't forget that while Intel won in certain markets, like notebooks, desktops and servers, it's absolutely, utterly irrelevant in other places that ship far, far more CPUs. A typical car may have as many as one hundred CPUs of various types, typically at least fifty, many of them PowerPC for power and legacy reasons. Your phone is probably ARM. Remote controls. Routers. Switches. Refrigerators. Thermostats. Televisions and displays. Hard drives. Keyboards and mice. Basically anything that needs some kind of compute capability probably has a non-Intel processor.

If there's a quagmire we're stuck in it's that we're surrounded by thousands of devices that are likely full of vulnerabilities that can never, will ever be fixed.

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

#63

Post by s-macke »

0xFFC wrote: post #52
s-macke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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.

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

#65

Post by zokier »

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?

Because ARM laptops have been shipping for years, while there isn't even a single RISC-V SoC out there that could even hypothetically be used in a laptop.

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

#66

Post by joezydeco »

sjburt wrote: post #59
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."

...which is a message to investors meaning "we're dropping the cost of our product without dropping prices".

If that ARM license is half a dollar, a billion devices per year is a lot of profit.

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

#67

Post by deepnotderp »

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.

Well, modern x86 "CISC" implementations are basically RISC internally with a translation layer on top of it.

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

#68

Post by eeZah7Ux »

gbrown_ wrote: post #46
ac29 wrote: post #25

Presentation slides: http://innovation.wdc.com/downloads/RISC-V-Presentation.pdf Presentation brief slides: http://innovation.wdc.com/downloads/RISC-V-Presentation-Brie...

Talk about buzzword bingo.

It's almost a parody.

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

#69

Post by nimish »

sjburt wrote: post #59
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."

Far more likely is that the SSD controllers that WD-SanDisk will create (that are the value-add difference between commodity NAND and good SSDs) will now use RISC-V cores. Samsung has a 5-core controller in its drives; I would guess that licensing costs are a pretty hefty chunk of the BOM for creating the controller

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

#70

Post by tyingq »

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.

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.
Post reply on HN