Western Digital's New Solutions To Support RISC-V Ecosystem
Zacks Investment Research | Dec 04, 2018 08:57PM ET
Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC) unveiled three latest open-source innovations at the RISC-V Summit at Santa Clara, CA. The company also announced that it is making progress toward transitioning approximately one billion of its processor cores to RISC-V’s standard architecture.
The company’s intention to open source its newly developed RISC-V standard SweRV Core was the key takeaway at the summit. With this move, the company attempts to accelerate the development of emerging data-centric technologies including the likes ofsecure processing, connected applications, Internet of Things (“IoT”), industrial controls, among others.
The latest RISC-V SweRV core is anticipated to accelerate the development process of customized design architecture “from core to edge.”
The core which has a 2-way design is expected to be made available in the first quarter of 2019. The new “32-bit, 9 stage pipeline” core is estimated to runat 4.9 CoreMarks/Mhz (megahertz). It provides clock speeds of up to 1.8gigahertz (Ghz), per company estimates on a 28mm CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) process technology.
Western Digital expects the latest core to find application in the company’s diverse internal embedded designs, comprising SSDsand flash controllers.
Western Digital also unveiled OmniXtend and SweRV Instruction Set Simulator (“ISS”). OmniXtend, an open solution, offers cache coherent memory to facilitate data sharing and access across processors. The new approach which currently supports Ethernet fabric is expected to run on other advanced fabrics, going ahead.
SweRV ISS provides “full test bench support” on RISC-V core architecture. Per the press release , "An ISS is a computer program, simulates the execution of instructions of a processor.”
In fact, Western Digital leveraged SweRV ISS to meticulously authenticate and simulate the latest SweRV Core, having executed instructions exceeding 10 billion. Both OmniXtend and SweRV ISS are available for download.
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