Western Digital Announces Plans to Open Source New RISC-V SweRV Core to Accelerate RISC-V Processor Development

During the RISC-V Summit, in Santa Clara, CA, Western Digital announced three new open-source innovations designed to support Western Digital’s internal RISC-V development efforts and those of the growing RISC-V ecosystem. In his keynote address, Western Digital’s Chief Technology Officer Martin Fink unveiled plans to release a new open source RISC-V core, an open standard initiative for cache coherent memory over a network and an open source RISC-V instruction set simulator.

Apple’s announcement on October 27, 2016, of a new generation of MacBook Pro laptops will be remembered obviously for the company’s “courage” to disrupt the traditional function keys on the keyboard, and the introduction of a fully programmable touch-screen called the Touch Bar. But more importantly it was the first confirmation that Thunderbolt 3 - the USB-C That Does it All, as Intel calls it - will be the future. And that’s what the industry was waiting for.

Need to increase your uncompressed and high-resolution audio library? Your 4K video library is expanding? Western Digital Corporation announced that its G-Technology product lines are now available with new 8TB and 10TB enterprise-class hard drives with increased performance to keep up with growing storage needs. For the moment, these storage solutions still use Thunderbolt 2 interfaces, which should be OK if you really need to expand now. Otherwise, wait for the new Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 systems, using USB-C connectors, probably coming early 2017.

HGST, a Western Digital company, announced the first enterprise-class 10TB hard disk drive (HDD) for next-generation active archive applications. This new HDD is the result of combining two complementary technologies – HGST’s second generation HelioSeal platform and shingled magnetic recording (SMR).