There's A New Libre GPU Effort Building On RISC-V, Rust, LLVM & Vulkan

[cb88]

Weston digitial is not after risc-v chips only for harddrives.

https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-western-digital-to-accelerate-the-future-of-next-generation-computing-architectures-for-big-data-and-fast-data-environments.html

Weasel is a pure fool. Weston digitial can see the writing on the wall and have stated so in press released around Risc-v from end of 2017 to now. When you start talking about systems with petabytes of ram/solid state storage spinning discs usage could come limited.

Esperanto development Weston Digital has directly invested in has no practical usage in a harddrive/ssd drive. So this should have you asking where is Weston Digital going.

Seems obvious enough, they are going to use RISC-V to field massive data collection... which will require even more massive data storage which will mean more HDDs because despite it all they still have better density and TCO than SSDs.

[oiaohm]

Seems obvious enough, they are going to use RISC-V to field massive data collection... which will require even more massive data storage which will mean more HDDs because despite it all they still have better density and TCO than SSDs.

This is party right. There is a problem here. Massive data collection is not profitable if you cannot process it and get results in reasonable time and be cost effective.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/12/wdc_mamr_tech/

By 2032 WD is expecting to have 100TB drives. To sell these drives the systems to process this level of data will have to be cost effective.

The reality of massive data collection is there is no point storing the data if you cannot process it. So without means to process massive volumes of data you could see 100TB drives result in massive drop in drive sales.

The other thing is the TCO advantage of SSD vs HDD is decreasing. By WD own forecasts they have 20 years to reposition self in market before the TCO advantage of SSD vs HDD goes away. . So lets say that over the next 5 to 10 years WD manages to make it self a provider of accelerators this will help WD sell drives and give them a secondary income stream.

Basically Weston Digital has many reasons for long term profitability to get into the accelerator/cpu game. You also have to remember we are going to hit the silicon production limit well before we get to the SSD/HDD TCO problem. The next 5 to 10 years expect to see companies attempting to diversity and attempting to expand the markets they are making income from. Also once we have hit the silicon production limit all that will be left it to fight over chip design.

[Weasel]

The reality of massive data collection is there is no point storing the data if you cannot process it. So without means to process massive volumes of data you could see 100TB drives result in massive drop in drive sales.

The reality is that you don't know what you're talking about since HDDs are slow and you won't be able to process more than 100MB/s for a single drive to begin with.

Any projection more than 5 years is retarded anyway. Remember, we were supposed to have 100Ghz CPUs ten years ago.

Also it's Western Digital, but I'm sure I know where you get Weston from... obvious.

[BoMbY]

And they probably should name it "Larramie" ...

[oiaohm]

The reality is that you don't know what you're talking about since HDDs are slow and you won't be able to process more than 100MB/s for a single drive to begin with.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7471502

2.3 ghz switching in next generation MAMR drives that gives you 200MB/s per head. The introduction multi read and write heads doubles to quads that. 800MB/s per drive without raid or anything else. That is current prototype technology. Our current day drives are slow. These speed increases means you could raid 10TB current day HDD into 1 100TB drive and be slower than the future 100TB MAMR drives. So this is not just a increase in storage density this is a increase in speed. We have not seen HDD increase in speed a lot Of course a MAMR drive is not going to be as fast as a SSD as a single drive but raided HDD this comes a different matter.

Any projection more than 5 years is retarded anyway. Remember, we were supposed to have 100Ghz CPUs ten years ago.

Did when the forecast that we would have 100Ghz CPU 10 years ago 100Ghz cpu exist in R&D and the problem was the factory to built them was not produced and ready for production no that was not the case.

The 20 year forecast by WD is based on what they have already produced in R&D and how long it will take to get it to mass production. So this is a different problem.

A complex factory can take 5 years to bring on line from start construction to first product. The level of clean room required by the ultra high density in silicon and hdd technology is making it slower and slower to make new factories.

5 years into the future 10 years ago was retarded. The practical issues now means it taking 5-15 years to go from what is tested to work in R&D to be able to deliver this to customers in volume. Today in storage MAMR for HDD designs for 20 years into the future and next 4 generation SSD technology exist in R&D but waiting for their factories to built for mass production. The R&D also has showing that everything has to go in stages with mass production fine tune the production lines.

Basically in storage we have got well ahead of what we can mass produce with our current knowledge of mass production error handling. But this is not a problem that will not be over come it basically requires producing enough product and improving the production lines from those failures.

Also it's Western Digital

Thanks spell checker had the other word in it.

My minor typo does not change that fact you just commented with something that is not fact. 800MB/s HDD something that exists in prototypes and will one day be in usage if SSD does not superseded the usage of HDD.

[Weasel]

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7471502
2.3 ghz switching in next generation MAMR drives that gives you 200MB/s per head. The introduction multi read and write heads doubles to quads that. 800MB/s per drive without raid or anything else. That is current prototype technology. Our current day drives are slow. These speed increases means you could raid 10TB current day HDD into 1 100TB drive and be slower than the future 100TB MAMR drives. So this is not just a increase in storage density this is a increase in speed. We have not seen HDD increase in speed a lot Of course a MAMR drive is not going to be as fast as a SSD as a single drive but raided HDD this comes a different matter.

Remember the Holographic Versatile Disc? That was a prototype too.

I get the feeling you really haven't been through much of this before since your arguments are always something like "but in the lab..."

Of course even a broken clock is right twice a day, but you get my drift...

[oiaohm]

Remember the Holographic Versatile Disc? That was a prototype too.

I remember them they could not be produced dependable way in R&D either.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120285999714463727

Problem is the green laser. Yes Holographic Versatile Discs can be made in Lab dependably that work if you can consume 3 5 1/4 drive bays.

MAMR this is stuff that currently can be made in lab that fits in current 3 1/2 standard hard-drive bays with standard size disc platters using standard platter chemistry and head control systems.

The biggest barrier is the controller silicon. 2.3ghz switching(read/write speed) this means you need about a 4 ghz clock speed controller for the drive. But there are other ways. Like reading from multi heads and multiplexing to increase speed as well. Without the competition from SSD the HDD makers could have avoided having 2 -4 independent arms inside the HDD controlling heads and kept on using single arm.

So there are two reason why HDD speed is going to increase. One is MAMR the other is multi arms inside drive. The multi arms with current drive technology equals up to 4 times faster drive without changing much. It is a funny one everything in computer world is kind of going serial and here is harddrives internally going parallel.

This is the problem you have missed for the next generation hard drives WD need high performance silicon. If they are making high performance silicon for HDD making accelerators and other things as well is just making good usage of their silicon development investment.

Reality here is the 100MB/s limit of current harddrives is going to be smashed both MAMR and multi arms smash that limit if both are able to be used with each other effectively we will see the 800MB/s drives. We are at least going to see 400MB/s HDD at some point even if all the technology currently developed is not deploy-able..

By the way Weasel WD is expecting the first double arm drives to customers in just the next few years. Quad arm is just double arm technology double stacked.

[Weasel]

oiaohm I'm saying that just because it was prototyped in the lab and projected for 20 years into the future doesn't mean it will become fact. I'm not sure how much simpler I can make it. Everything you said could become true, or not, like a lot of long projections in the past (see above, don't want to repeat them again...). Your problem is that you believe that everything in the lab or "theoretically possible" will become fact when clearly history isn't on your side at all.

Worse is when they just do projections/extrapolations and you just eat it like it's fact and it is guaranteed to succeed.

[oiaohm]

oiaohm I'm saying that just because it was prototyped in the lab and projected for 20 years into the future doesn't mean it will become fact. I'm not sure how much simpler I can make it. Everything you said could become true, or not, like a lot of long projections in the past (see above, don't want to repeat them again...). Your problem is that you believe that everything in the lab or "theoretically possible" will become fact when clearly history isn't on your side at all.

The problem here is 100 MB/s limit of harddrives without question is going to be exceeded.

Looking into the future for long term planing requires looking at what is theoretically possible.

In business you only have to look what happened to IBM to wake up that large company to relocate themselves in a market takes 10 to 15 years. So business planning by large companies have to be looking at 20 year forecasts even if they are a little questionable.

Current MAMR says that these drives will need microcontrollers as fast or faster than current day cpus to extract best performance.

Worse is when they just do projections/extrapolations and you just eat it like it's fact and it is guaranteed to succeed.

Really what I am telling is what WD management will be using to forecast what they will need in the next 20 years. Correct not all R&D is guaranteed to be success.

When WD is needing in next 20 years micro-controllers as faster as current x86 chips and cost effective. This is not going to come from x86 and unlikely to come from arm. Yes to allow for some R&D failures WD has to start now. Of course how is WD going to recover the cost of these developments.

Really please note the long term projection you pointed to had a flaw it was presumed green lasers would come simple to produce and reliable. MAMR is already more reliable than prior drive technologies.

When you do 20 year forcasts based on technology that works fully in LAB they are different to other projections. Adding more arms in drives have to happen in stages to get field exposure. 4 arm drives work in lab already. What is required is the field testing to confirm they are strong enough in real world production handling. WD is starting with 2 arm drives that then will be followed by 3 arm drives and finally 4 arm drives the 2 arm drives alone see HDD exceeding 100MB/s.

[lkcl]

I thought of this a while ago. I don't think that we will see any "widely-used" open-source GPU in the near future. There is just no man-power to create and maintain such things. Most projects start somewhere but fail along the line.

i think one of the main reasons for that is they go for the "open claim" without actually being truly open. and, they bite off far more than they can chew. both the GPLGPU and the Open 3D targetted *graphics cards*, not a 3D engine.

in addition, the typical 3D design actually involves inter-process communication (remote procedure calls!) between CPU and GPU. that's a HELL of a lot of work. EVERY single data structure, every single function call, of which there are dozens if not hundreds, has to be packed up on the CPU, the GPU notified where the packed data is, the GPU unpacks it, does work, packs the response (if any) back up, notifies the CPU, and the CPU unpacks the answer and FINALLY the function is done.

i understand *why* it's done that way - it's just completely insane. so we're doing a hybrid CPU-GPU approach: the CPU *is* the GPU, and that's why we chose to do a software-based renderer (and then write custom RISC-V instructions and associated assembly routines, where needed)

also, with kazan being a software renderer, it's effectively a Reference Implementation just like Mesa3D is a Reference Implementation of OpenGL. so, i've reached out to the Khronos Group to see if they'd like to sponsor the project.

the general idea, therefore, is to provide *useful* milestones along the way, tackling things piece-by-piece, and inviting people to help out, which they can do because it's *genuinely* an actual open project, not a "we'll release it when it's finished" project. the code's available for review *right now*.
[/quote]

I think there are just 2 options:
1. like this project but not as a separate chip: just make a display output (i.e. DisplayPort) and run everything else on the CPU via LLVMpipe and vulkan-cpu. Sure the CPU needs many cores that way.

just an aside: LLVMpipe has design limitations: the shader is not accelerated and there's a critical single-threaded design limitation. this is why jacob started kazan, a Vulkan3D driver.

yes, the idea is to beef up *standard* SMP-based RISC-V cores to the point where there's effectively absolutely no difference between the CPU and the GPU. for general-purpose execution, a program would simply not use the custom 3D instructions. with the increased FP performance and the increased memory bandwidth required to support 3D, i would expect significant performance increases for general-purpose computing as well.

and all of this done publicly so that people can help contribute if they want to.