RISC-V Spins into Drives, AI

Rick Merritt, EETimes
11/28/2017 02:40 PM EST

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Storage giant Western Digital announced that it will standardize on RISC-V processors and has invested in Esperanto Technologies, a startup designing high-end SoCs and cores using the open-source instruction set architecture. The two moves suggest that RISC-V has emerged as a viable — but not yet mature — alternative to ARM and the x86.

Long-term, WD expects that it could ship as many as 2 billion RISC-V chips a year inside its hard-disk and solid-state drives. Privately, the company also revealed that it is working on machine-learning accelerators for inference, probably related to its unspecified investment in Esperanto.

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