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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

#71

Post by StillBored »

pjc50 wrote: post #19
H99189 wrote: post #4

I like the idea behind RISC-V's open architecture but I had a question. Does it do or even try to do anything about the cloud of uncertainty surrounding Intel ME and the AMD equivalent in x86?

That depends on the manufacturer. There's no reason such a thing has to be there. A lot of people are hoping that someone will put in the work to bring the architecture up to speeds competitive with i7 and mass-manufacture it, despite being legally cloneable.

I'm not much of a RISC-V guy, but using the arch doesn't require you to open up your design (the arch is basically BSD). So, someone who puts the effort into making a super fast risc-v core will still have an advantage over most everyone else as the effort required to create a fast core is a lot different from the effort required to just get something that works.

So, the devices can't just be "cloned" without the RTL/etc for the design, and even if someone got some masks or the RTL via an illicit source it would still be copyrighted enough to keep them from selling the clones..

Of course if "clone" means you spend hundreds of millions of dollars building your own competitive core, then yes that is still allowed..

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

#73

Post by Koshkin »

deepnotderp wrote: post #67
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.

I don't think this matters, as long as the internals are completely inaccessible to a programmer. In other words, what happens inside is not what is usually called "architecture" (which is part of the definition of what RISC is).

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

#74

Post by WillPostForFood »

joezydeco wrote: post #66
sjburt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be surprising if prices didn't continue to drop.

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

#75

Post by 0xFFC »

s-macke wrote: post #63
0xFFC wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know ( and i upvoted both of your comments)

No hard feelings ;) But i have a right to defend my comment.

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

#76

Post by jsmthrowaway »

zokier wrote: post #54
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 wha…

To be fair, it is strange that they broke out core, processor, and controller as separate items in that verbiage. They're probably referring to the application processors in My Cloud, external drives, and so on.

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

#78

Post by paulie_a »

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.

From my simplistic understanding even in the risc programming class I took in 2001. Risc became a cisc one instruction at a time

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

#79

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mtgx wrote: post #32
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…

It helps that the ISA is supported in more places, even if for awareness alone. Compare where ARM was 10 years ago, where it was 5 years ago, and now we're discussing having competitive alternatives to Intel and AMD in servers. As new developments seem to happen at an accelerated pace, RISC-V should also see more accelerated adoption. It won't take 30 years to get get to where ARM is today. Maybe only 10, or less.

10 years ago was when the iPhone came out, ARM was already fairly established, better to look at intel’s strongarm acquisition almost 20 years ago, when ARM’s future was much more in doubt.

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

#80

Post by lovemenot »

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…

Language used in the article - edge computing and fast data - suggests WD is going after potential new markets indicated in the a16z presentation [1].

The He8 concept seems to make sense in that context. So it would not be surprising to see RISC-V extended to better support this new category: call it locally-edge-attached-fast-storage.

[1] https://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/

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