Western Digital is beginning to use in-house controllers in its new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs, but has confirmed that they do not contain RISC-V cores just yet:
Western Digital has announced their first client NVMe SSDs with their SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. These drives are also the first to feature Western Digital's new in-house NVMe SSD controllers. This is a major shift in strategy away from third-party controllers (mostly Marvell) toward complete vertical integration.
The new SSDs are called the Western Digital SN720 and Western Digital SN520. Branding for these is a bit of a mess with the drives bearing the Western Digital name and model numbers that almost fit in with the HGST Ultrastar SN200 and SN260 enterprise NVMe SSDs, but the product information is on the SanDisk website and the target market is similar to that of SanDisk's business/OEM drives like the X400 and X600 SATA SSDs. Western Digital may be trying to unify and simplify their several brands, but it's a work in progress.
[...] Western Digital hasn't disclosed what kind of processor cores are used in their NVMe controllers, but they did confirm that these aren't using the RISC-V architecture—those products won't be arriving until next year at the earliest. The Western Digital NVMe controllers are probably using ARM Cortex-R cores like most SSD controllers.
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Early to embed and early to rise? Western Digital drops veil on SweRVy RISC-V based designs
Western Digital today finally flashed the results of its vow to move a billion controller cores to RISC-V designs. WD said last year it needed an open and extensible CPU architecture for its purpose-built drive controllers and other devices. As we explained then, no one knew for sure what processors WD has used for its disk and SSD controllers, though they was likely Arm-compatible chips – such as Arm9 and Cortex-M3 parts. It is known that the firm uses Intel CPUs with its ActiveScale archive systems and Tegile all-flash and hybrid arrays.
Last year, the disk and solid-state drive manufacturer vowed that RISC-V was its future, and today it announced the SweRV core, a networked cache coherency scheme, and a SweRV instruction set simulator.
[...] The SweRV core has a two-way superscalar design and is a 32-bit, nine-stage pipeline core, meaning several instructions can be loaded at once and execute simultaneously to save time. It is also an in-order core, whose relative single core performance (a simulated 4.9 CoreMark/Mhz) is expected to exceed that of many out-of-order cores, such as the Arm Cortex A15 (actual 4.72CoreMark/Mhz). Clock speeds go up to 1.8Ghz and it will be built on a
28mm[28nm] CMOS process technology.WD said it hopes open-sourcing the core will drive development of data-centric applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), secure processing, industrial controls and more. We understand WD's ambitions for using RISC-V CPUs go beyond disk and flash drive controllers.
Previously: Western Digital to Transition Consumption of Over One Billion Cores Per Year to RISC-V
Related: WD Announces Client NVMe SSDs with In-House Controllers
From a Western Digital press release:
Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today at the 7th RISC-V Workshop that the company intends to lead the industry transition toward open, purpose-built compute architectures. In his keynote address, Western Digital's Chief Technology Officer Martin Fink expressed the company's commitment to [...] transitioning its own consumption of processors – over one billion cores per year – to RISC-V.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02 2018, @07:20AM
Give me XPoint or give me death.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 02 2018, @01:57PM (2 children)
NVMe is interesting but I just can't see the usefulness in removing the ability to locate your storage somewhere other than directly sticking out of the main board. It really just doesn't make sense to me unless you're trying to build as compact a device as physically possible, which is not always the case.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday March 02 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)
NVMe is more than just a form factor, it's a whole new storage interface that does away with the limitations of AHCA in SATA. A very important feature is parallel command processing to handle multiple threaded requests without locking. I see your point about storage location but with things getting smaller and higher in density, this isn't much of a problem. If Thunderbolt or similar becomes more widely adopted then you can expect to see NVM->Thunderbolt or USB adapters. I'm also certain USB attached storage will suffice for many as well.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 03 2018, @04:31AM
It's a pretty significant problem if you're building a desktop box. Half a dozen NVMe slots take up a whole lot more room on a motherboard than half a dozen sata ports and they have to be located somewhere that's not blocking air coming off the video card(s) or CPU.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.