Seagate released a new risc-v architecture processor: the performance of mechanical hard disk soared 3 times

In the past two years , Open source RISC-V Instruction set architecture is a new favorite in chip design industry , Many technology giants have launched their own RISC-V Architecturally CPU processor .12 month 9 Daily news , According to foreign media TechPowerUp fact , Seagate technology, a major manufacturer of mechanical hard disks, announced , It has designed two models based on RISC-V Instruction set architecture processor , One of them is designed for high performance , And has been tested in mechanical hard disk , The other one is used for area optimization , The design has been completed , Building .

Seagate said , For real-time 、 pivotal HDD The workload , The high-performance core provides three times the performance of the current solution . In addition, it also supports advanced servo ( Mobile control ) Algorithm , Used to control the movement of the head between adjacent tracks , More precise positioning can be achieved . In the initial use case , This chip enables Seagate to significantly improve its real-time processing capability .

The area optimized kernel has a flexibly configurable microarchitecture 、 Feature set . The optimized kernel optimizes the packaging area , It also reduces power consumption , To assist or support the background workload . It can also perform security sensitive edge computing operations , Including a new generation of post quantum encryption .

Both processors are integrated RISC-V Safety features of , At the edge 、 The cloud can bring more powerful data reliability 、 Security 、 mobility , Seagate itself is OpenTitan( Security chip design open source project ) One of the members of .

Seagate's chief technology officer John Morris Express ：“ take RISC-V Introducing storage devices , Create opportunities for computing power for specific applications , Make large-scale parallel computing storage solutions possible . We believe that , These architectures support many important instances , Including scientific simulation and machine learning .”

Although in the impression of many people , Seagate is just a manufacturer of mechanical hard disk , But in fact, most of the control chips in Seagate's hard disk are designed by Seagate itself . data display , Only in the past year , Seagate delivered nearly 10 Billion integrated RISC-V Core chip .

It is worth mentioning that , Another big hard disk giant, Western Digital, is also 2018 Released at the end of the year based on RISC-V Autonomous general architecture of instruction set SweRV、 Open source SweRV Instruction set simulator (ISS), And open to third-party chip manufacturers ,2019 At the end of the year, two special microcontrollers were released CPU SweRV Core EH2、SweRV Core EL2.

edit ： Smart core - Woods