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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

#91

Post by simcop2387 »

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…

That said, it's not like they're user inaccessible either.

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

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

#92

Post by _chris_ »

tyingq wrote: post #70
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.

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.

WD made it clear in there talk that this wasn't about saving on costs, but rather having control over the innovation in the data space.

I don't see any reason to doubt them. It's an incredible risk to switch their entire company over to a still-growing ISA. But being able to design and modify any particular core as they see fit without having to talk to lawyers or negotiate a new contract... that's an incredible power.

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

#93

Post by deepnotderp »

wmf wrote: post #11
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…

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…

Esperanto Technologies is working on high performance general purpose RISC-V processors.

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

#94

Post by rubatuga »

eroccatlun wrote: post #84
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.

Sounds ... RiskV. YYYEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

I know these comments aren’t really allowed but I laughed

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

#95

Post by sliverstorm »

_chris_ wrote: post #92
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.

WD made it clear in there talk that this wasn't about saving on costs, but rather having control over the innovation in the data space. I don't see any reason to doubt them. It's an incredible risk to switch their entire company over to a still-growing ISA. But being able to design and modify any particular core as they see fit without having to talk to lawyers or negotiate a new contract... that's an incredible powe…

RISC-V is certainly more unencumbered, but there's always the ARM architecture license too. Pricey, but you can modify and build on a relatively more mature ISA

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

#96

Post by CyberDildonics »

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…

That would mean that the bandwidth from the hard drive is a large bottleneck, which I have a hard time believing is true.

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

#97

Post by baobrien »

zokier wrote: post #60
ac29 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to the workshop summary, they plan to ship a Linux capable dev board with hard U54 silicon in Q1 of 2018.

http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/11/seventh-risc-v-workshop-...

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

#98

Post by phkahler »

tonmoy wrote: post #77

This is so exciting, can’t wait for all the open source contributions to RISC-V WD will make

It is an interesting play. I didn't think WD would be all that relevant, but... I figured with open ISA the CPU would no longer be a significant piece of IP and competition and leadership would move to those with graphics IP. OTOH if tightly coupled CPU and storage was to become a big thing then storage companies would be the big winners (maybe just in some markets). But the fact that they talk about contributing back is interesting. If companies with GFX or storage want their specialty to become the real value, they will benefit by contributing high quality IP to the open CPU movement thereby destroying the market for the old guard (CPU makers).

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

#99

Post by nickik »

astrodust wrote: post #62
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 suc…

> and here we are where nobody cares about the distinction.

Exept, you know the people who created RISC-V. They specifically named it RISC-V to reiterate the point the were making of the advantages of RISC.

Its a literal statment to anybody saying 'Your doing it wrong, RISC is better, so again, RISC-V, please use it'.

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

#100

Post by Moto7451 »

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.

Your point still stands, but it’s probaably less than fifty cents unless they’re building something really high end.

Oldie but goodie: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

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