Western Digital To Begin Shipping Devices Using RISC-V

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Western Digital To Begin Shipping Devices Using RISC-V

RISC-V has a big new hardware backer... Western Digital...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Western-Digital-RISC-V

[GunpowaderGuy]

i wonder what kind of modifications ( extensions ) risc V can still receive without breaking compatiblity for the most part ( too late for breaking changes , right ? )

[GunpowaderGuy]

i heard some people were attempting vliw / EPIC extensions

[GunpowaderGuy]

hope they implement the fp16 extensions for ai , and or release high end ( many cores ) models without floating point ( for binarized networks )

[GI_Jack]

Not surprised. I would not be surprised if RISC-V takes a pretty big chunk of the low end embedded market, such as drive controllers, and such. I eventually see it competing with mid-range ARM chips in the long run, perhaps eventually the high end of ARM.

EDIT: tired, mixed up Arch's

[willmore]

Not surprised. I would not be surprised if MIPS-V takes a pretty big chunk of the low end embedded market, such as drive controllers, and such. I eventually see it competing with mid-range ARM chips in the long run, perhaps eventually the high end of ARM.

I hope that was a typo and that you meant RISC-V. MIPS-V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_V#MIPS_V

[danieru]

hooping for RISC-V cpus without huge backdoors, and without entire operating systems running in the background with total ram access. and without locked down boot loader to install my own linux rom if i want to

Not even "free as freedom" cpus, just asking for a computer that I can actually own. Something like in the old BIOS (pre 2011) times is good enough

[miabrahams]

Even if the licensing fees for these simple chips embedded are small indeed, once you consider multiplying it by 1 billion, it makes sense to switch to the open option of RISC-V.

[audir8]

I guess the first processor to be open source was Sparc T1/T2, OpenPower is open if you pay enough AFAIK. There have been hobbyist cores since, but RISC-V is the first one to really be picked up by industry/academia/startups/consumer (as softcores in FPGAs for now). Thanks UCB/Team!

Edit: OpenRISC was before Sparc T1/T2: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1214097

[starshipeleven]

Even if the licensing fees for these simple chips embedded are small indeed, once you consider multiplying it by 1 billion, it makes sense to switch to the open option of RISC-V.

Open does not automatically mean "gratis".
RISC-V is an ISA, commercial RISC-V designs are is still going to have some kind of license so the designers can be paid, and there is nothing wrong in that.

The main reason everyone apart from Intel is getting onboard of RISC-V train is because it's a better ISA, and because every company can easily (relatively speaking) design his own processor tailored to his workload with it, unlike with current ISAs that are mostly stuck on general-purpose designs because there is only ONE designer that wants to sell the same designs to everyone.

And this is what WDC also says https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroo...ironments.html

The “general-purpose” technologies and architectures that have been in place for decades are reaching their limits of scalability, performance and efficiency. General-purpose workloads that are supported by general-purpose architectures typically have a uniform ratio of processing resources, such as operating system (OS) processing, specialty offload processing, memory, data storage and interconnect. As Big Data gets bigger and faster, and Fast Data gets faster and bigger, the "one size fits all" approach of general-purpose computing is failing to meet the increasingly diverse application workloads of our data-centric world.