Western Digital backs RISC-V

Western Digital pledged its support for the RISC-V, an open and scalable compute architecture.

The company plans to transition future core, processor, and controller development to the RISC-V architecture.

Western Digital 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 annually. The company is committed to advancing RISC-V technology for use in mission-critical applications so that it can be deployed in its products.

Western Digital recently completed a strategic investment in Esperanto Technologies, a developer of high-performance, energy-efficient computing solutions based on the open RISC-V architecture. Esperanto, which is headquartered in Mountain View, California, includes a seasoned 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.

“Western Digital is a leader in storage products and technologies, and we are now expanding that leadership to open, data-centric compute architectures,” said Mike Cordano, president and chief operating officer, Western Digital. “RISC-V will allow the entire industry to realize the benefits of next-generation architectures while also enabling us to create more purpose-built devices, platforms and storage systems for Big Data and Fast Data applications. We are moving beyond just storing data to now creating entire environments that will enable users to realize the value and

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