Western Digital to Transition Consumption of Over One Billion Cores Per Year to RISC-V to Drive Open Source Processor Momentum for Data Center and Edge Computing
Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today at the 7th RISC-V Workshop its intention to lead the industry’s transition to an open, custom-built computing architecture to address the growing application needs of a data-centric world. In his opening remarks, Western Digital Chief Technology Office Martin Fink discussed the company’s commitment to helping lead the development of data-centric computing environments through the RISC-V Foundation. RISC-V is an open and scalable computing architecture that will enable Big Data and Fast Data applications and workloads in cloud data center cores and in remote and mobile systems across the globe. edge. Western Digital’s leadership role in the RISC-V initiative is significant as the company aims to accelerate the development of this technology and the associated ecosystem by moving its own processor consumption – more than one billion cores per year – to RISC-V.
As Big Data and Fast Data environments expand, they break the boundaries of traditional infrastructure and system architectures. The various “general-purpose” technologies and architectures that have been around for decades have reached the limit in terms of scalability, performance and efficiency. General-purpose workloads supported by general-purpose architecture usually have a uniform ratio of process resources, such as operating system (OS) processes, dedicated offload processes, memory, data storage, and interconnection. As Big Data gets bigger and faster, and Fast Data gets bigger and bigger too, the ‘one size fits all’ approach of general-purpose computing is failing to meet the increasingly diverse application workloads of our data-centric world.
Data-Centered Environment
As Big Data and Fast Data workloads grow, data-centric computing architectures will require the ability to scalable resources, independent of others. Future architectures will need to go beyond the limited resource ratios and standards of general-purpose computing architectures and enable tailor-made solutions with optimal data rates of OS processes, dedicated processes, memory, storage and interconnects. Extreme data and compute workloads for analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and intelligent systems require tailor-made environments.
Western Digital is a leader in storage products and technologies, and we are now extending that leadership to open, data-centric computing architectures,” said Mike Cordano, President and Chief Operating Officer, Western Digital. “RISC-V will enable the entire industry to realize the benefits of next-generation architectures, while enabling us to create more devices, platforms and storage systems tailor-made for Big Data and Fast Data applications. We are now moving from simply storing data to creating an environment that will enable users to realize the value and possibilities of their data.”
Moving Computing Closer to Data
Western Digital is a leading provider of solutions for capturing, storing, accessing and transforming data. RISC-V will enable the company to participate in, and leverage a broad community of investors, focused on bringing ever-increasing amounts of processing power closer to data. As computing power moves closer to data, customers will be able to minimize the movement of data across edge and within the data center, optimizing processes based on location, workload or time-value requirements.
Accelerating the RISC-V . Ecosystem
To contribute to the progress and success of the RISC-V ecosystem, Western Digital plans to move development of future cores, processors and controllers to the RISC-V architecture. Western Digital currently consumes more than one billion processor cores annually across its product portfolio. This move will be gradual and when completed, Western Digital expects to ship two billion RISC-V cores annually. The company is committed to advancing RISC-V technology for use in mission-critical applications, which can be deployed in its products.
Western Digital is engaged in active partnerships and investments in RISC-V ecosystem partners. Western Digital recently completed a strategic investment in Esperanto Technologies, a developer of power efficient high performance computing solutions based on the open RISC-V architecture. Esperanto, headquartered in Mountain View, California, has an expert team of experienced processor and software engineers, with the goal of making RISC-V the architecture of choice for compute-intensive applications, such as machine learning.
“The open source movement has shown the world that innovation is maximized with a large community working toward a common goal,” said Fink. “Therefore, we are providing all of our RISC-V logical work to the community. We also encourage open collaboration among all industry participants, including our customers and partners, to help expand and accelerate these efforts. Together, we can drive data-centric innovation and ensure RISC-V becomes the next Linux success story.”
For more information about the RISC-V announcement or to view a recording of Martin Fink’s remarks at the 7th RISC-V Workshop, visit http://innovation.wdc.com.
For more information about the RISC-V Foundation and the 7th RISC-V Workshop, visit https://riscv.org.