HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-28) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a
Year
156 points by deepnotderp
https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-west...1-28-western-digital-to-accelerate-the-future-of-next-generation-computing-architectures-for-big-data-and-fast-data-environmen___________________________________________________________________
microcolonel - 2 hours ago
I think the level of industry enthusiasm for RISC-V is so palpable,
in part, because the messaging from day one has been unequivocally:
RISC-V will be the standard ISA for every form factor, in every
market.Can't wait to put a RISC-V SBC in my ThinkPad X220 chassis.
:- )
mr_spothawk - 2 hours ago
> a RISC-V SBC in my ThinkPad X220 chassisafk, changing pants
anderspitman - 46 minutes ago
I'm so excited that we're feasibly within a year or two of being
able to develop embedded devices in Rust[0] on RISC-V
microcontrollers [1] running on open source RTOSes also written
in Rust[2]. It's currently already possible but still requires
quite a bit of hacking. Plus the RF stacks (Bluetooth in
particular) aren't there yet. What a time to be a developer. PS
RISC-V on my X220 wouldn't hurt either.[0]
http://blog.japaric.io/quickstart/[1]
https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/[2]
https://www.tockos.org/
jstewartmobile - 1 hours ago
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 compilers catering to the least common denominator
than anything else. If you had a language/compiler that took
better advantage of a stack architecture, or even a CISC
architecture, the performance would probably be just as good if not
better.I was particularly impressed by Baker's old paper[0] on
stack architectures in service of his Linear Lisp idea.[0]
http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ForthStack.html
pkaye - 1 hours ago
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.
nabla9 - 1 hours ago
RISC-V is just ISA. I don't think ISA's can be patented. Just
some specific instructions.
pkaye - 1 hours ago
Yes, they did the research for prior art to make sure that is
the case for their instruction set.
jstewartmobile - 1 hours ago
Were there any academic obstructions to OpenRISC or OpenSPARC?
anderspitman - 52 minutes ago
https://riscv.org/2014/10/why-not-build-on-openrisc/
[deleted]
H99189 - 2 hours ago
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?
microcolonel - 2 hours ago
I don't think it necessarily addresses that concern, but Machine
mode might be the right place to address the concerns which ME
addresses on a RISC-V machine; which means that it's at least
more likely that it'll be programmable on whatever machine you're
looking at.Just a thought though, it could really go any way. The
nice thing though, is that you'll have more than two vendors,
which means that the niche of PSP/ME paranoids may be large
enough to address for a smaller designer, or through a limited
run of licensed design (like SiFive's).
sverige - 2 hours ago
I'm one of the paranoids. This is one of the main things I'm
hoping for. Is there any indication of what price point such
chips might be offered at? I have no idea how much it costs to
set up fabrication, etc., but it seems like ARM chips have done
very well.
erikj - 1 hours ago
ARM chips have a much higher production volume so they are
going to be much cheaper than RISC-V chips, at least for the
foreseeable future.
pjc50 - 1 hours ago
How long is a piece of string?It depends entirely on features
and performance. Like Intel and arm chips have a 10x range of
cost.
garmaine - 1 hours ago
There is a security working group. If you are concerned about
this I highly recommend joining the foundation as an individual
(or getting your employer to join), and asking to be put on that
WG.It?s a critically important question and it requires active
grassroots involvement to make sure that we don?t end up with a
mere clone of ME, or worse a ?better ME.?
pjc50 - 1 hours ago
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.
StillBored - 10 minutes ago
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..
pedroaraujo - 2 hours ago
RISC-V is not an architecture, it is just an instruction set.
People still need to design the architecture for an
implementation of RISC-V.Intel ME is a co-processor that runs at
the same time as the main processor, it is not related to the
instruction set.To answer your question: Intel ME is a problem
that happens on an higher level than the document that defines
instruction set.
fulafel - 1 hours ago
There are "instruction set architecture" and
"microarchitecture" (=specific implementation of an ISA). ISA
is the one more commonly referred to as just architecture, I
think.
ac29 - 1 hours ago
Presentation slides: http://innovation.wdc.com/downloads/RISC-V-Pre
sentation.pdfPresentation brief slides:
http://innovation.wdc.com/downloads/RISC-V-Presentation-Brie...
gbrown_ - 48 minutes ago
Talk about buzzword bingo.
eeZah7Ux - 13 minutes ago
It's almost a parody.
sverige - 2 hours ago
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 purpose chips likely to be one result of
the development of RISC-V, or have I missed something fundamental?
garmaine - 1 hours ago
You should read up on SiFive.
ac29 - 1 hours ago
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/
zokier - 21 minutes ago
> and ship with Linux supportJust 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.
Symmetry - 1 hours ago
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
long run using RISC-V in a laptop is a possibility. And there
might be some limited production $2000 500MHz FOSS laptop
soonish. But in 15 years, say, I could see RISC-V being where
ARM is now.
mtgx - 1 hours ago
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.
wmf - 1 hours ago
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 it will take time.
guelo - 1 hours ago
The announcement does say "we are providing all of our RISC-V
logic work to the community." Whatever that means.
garmaine - 1 hours ago
It means essentially ?open source,? its just that this time
the source code is in a hardware definition language.
microcolonel - 1 hours ago
> Out of the whole RISC-V ecosystem it looks like only SiFive
is working on that, so it will take time.If you look at
Qualcomm's strategy with x86 competition (using Dynamic Binary
Translation), it's not hard to imagine that they might consider
building RISC-V application processors; especially once they've
proven their ability to deliver enough compatibility and
performance with DBT to compete on ISAs for which their device
is not licensed (and especially if they are sued by Intel and
win, one of those things where you'd jump for joy if you saw a
C&D in the mail).
csense - 1 hours ago
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 after reading the whole thing, I
don't know if this guess is correct.
Dylan16807 - 32 minutes ago
Hard drives already have moderately powerful processors in them.
So there's no reason to assume any change in feature set.
zokier - 28 minutes ago
> 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 annuallyI 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.
sjburt - 22 minutes ago
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."
nimish - 13 minutes ago
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
joezydeco - 16 minutes ago
...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.
Symmetry - 51 minutes ago
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.
tyingq - 12 minutes ago
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.
technofiend - 33 minutes ago
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 like the He8.I found the whole
concept of on-board PCB with dual gig ethernet ports fascinating
and I believe there's a second generation with faster network
speeds. Unfortunately WD never seem to have gone mainstream with
it.[0] http://ceph.com/geen-categorie/500-osd-ceph-cluster/
milesf - 29 minutes ago
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.
zokier - 26 minutes ago
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.
tzahola - 21 minutes ago
>CISC's bullied them away and we've been stuck in Intel's
quagmire every sinceYou know that ARM means Advanced RISC
Machine, right?
astrodust - 20 minutes ago
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.
deepnotderp - 15 minutes ago
Well, modern x86 "CISC" implementations are basically RISC
internally with a translation layer on top of it.
Numberwang - 2 hours ago
I have not been following this, what are the advantages?
linkregister - moments ago
It's a bid deal for RISC-V enthusiasts, who are delighted to see
it in consumer products.
microcolonel - 1 hours ago
Smaller designs, easier to license designs, simpler and more
attractive ISA extension mechanisms, no royalties, no license
negotiation periods, no incremental cost to adding more cores of
different designs.
tw04 - 1 hours ago
For you as an end-user? Nothing. For WD? They escape paying
ARM licensing fees on every drive. They'll see an extra couple
points of margin on every hard drive they sell.
asb - 26 minutes ago
If you're interested in what's going on at the RISC-V Workshop, you
might want to follow my live blog here:
http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/11/seventh-risc-v-workshop-...
nolanpro - 1 hours ago
"RISC" is a terrible name for anything related to computing
pavlov - 1 hours ago
Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) doesn't seem to have suffered from
the association.
0xFFC - 2 hours ago
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.
s-macke - 45 minutes ago
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 that you are not really aware of
the market and architecture.
0xFFC - 32 minutes ago
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 daringIt 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 architectureAgain. 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.
s-macke - 19 minutes ago
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.
topspin - 1 hours ago
Yes, this mod behavior is pretty astonishing. microcolonel's
comment is getting downvoted as well for no apparent reason.I
guess there are RISC-V haters...? Good grief.
0xFFC - 1 hours ago
Yeah exactly. I would say this is very informative comment but
sadly gets downvoted:>>Smaller designs, easier to license
designs, simpler and more attractive ISA extension mechanisms,
no royalties, no license negotiation periods, no incremental
cost to adding more cores of different designs.
phkahler - 1 hours ago
>> Why do people downvote?Because they can't handle the fact that
you're right. RISC-V is coming for all of them. I like your
phrasing too, it's accurate but I guess people think it's more
pretentious. Only time will tell for sure.
pjc50 - 1 hours ago
There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this. It's like
Linux on the desktop: doable but very much a fringe thing.
garmaine - 1 hours ago
Why is it any more fringe than, say, hoping for an ARM
laptop?
wmf - 1 hours ago
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.
phkahler - 25 minutes ago
>> 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.
ansible - 24 minutes ago
There are a few ARM based Chromebooks. In many cases, it
isn't too hard to put regular Linux on them.
zokier - 17 minutes ago
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.
phkahler - 54 minutes ago
>> There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this.Yeah I
agree, but the list of giant companies involved in the
wishing is what makes it seem like more than a pipe dream.
Just think how much revenue ARM will lose when WD, nVidia,
Samsung and others all switch to RISC-V in their embedded
devices.
flamedoge - 17 minutes ago
everybody makes processors!
erikj - 1 hours ago
So WD is switching their hardware to in-house designed processors
after purchasing a RISC-V developer, do I understand this press
release correctly?
microcolonel - 36 minutes ago
WD had already been a RISC-V foundation member before their
involvement with Esperanto Technologies (who has also been a
member for a while). I suspect they saw Esperanto's portfolio and
team after meeting at one of the workshops, and bought into it
because of preexisting interest in RISC-V.Just to be clear, I
think they bought into Esperanto, but I don't think they acquired
it. Much public communication implies that Esperanto Technologies
is still generally autonomous[0][1].[0]:
https://twitter.com/rickbmerritt/status/935600820300713985[1]:
https://twitter.com/EsperantoTech/status/935598028773138432