Digital transformation and the proliferation of big data are driving a renaissance in software development, requiring new advancements in hardware and processors. With a range of needs from a variety of users and platforms, standard instruction set architectures are no longer fulfilling all use cases as the demand for flexibility and improved performance increases.

“The world is dominated by two instruction set architectures. … Both are great, but … they’re owned by their respective companies. RISC-V is a third entrant into this world … it’s completely open source,” said Martin Fink (pictured, right), chief technology officer of Western Digital Corp. Through the RISC-V initiative, Fink and Dave Tang (pictured, left), senior vice president of corporate marketing at Western Digital, are working to provide an instruction set that can be freely shared to encourage innovation.

Fink and Tang spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss RISC-V and the potential of its impact on modern compute processing.

Building solutions where data lives

Western Digital hopes for RISC-V to usher in a new era of processor innovation through the community collaboration of its open-source foundation. With the range of workload diversity and rate at which big data is scaling, Western Digital is confident an open, flexible system will be key to staying relevant through tech’s current and future transformations.

“It’s critical as we get more immersed in a data-centric world where we have real-time applications … as well as … big data analytics … [and] for … machine learning. … We need ways to contend with that that go beyond what’s available with general purpose architecture,” Tang said.

The advanced processing capabilities are also designed to streamline and simplify use for overall improved functionality. Fink described one use case that echoed the efficiency arguments for edge computing. “If you think of a very typical surveillance application … we’re grabbing a ton of video frames, but very few of them change. … Why don’t we … only ship up … the frames that have something interesting. … That’s a very typical application,” he said.

RISC-V allows end users to build processors with customized instruction sets for specific tasks like this one, increasing efficiency and saving costs overall.

Enabling end users to focus only on relevant data isn’t where RISC-V’s utility ends. The initiative promises to extend battery life with no impact on performance, another effective cost saver. “Even in our small devices like a USB stick … if we can reduce power consumption and even just maintain performance, that’s a huge win for our customers,” Fink said.

Western Digital is currently in the beginning stage of migrating all its internal microprocessors to RISC-V, a process that involves transferring approximately a billion cores per year to the new architecture. The commitment is significant and strategic. “We decided to go early with a significant commitment to tell the world that we were bringing scale to the equation. … You can make that commitment to RISC-V because we’ve got your back,” Fink said.

That commitment is as much a promise to investors as one to Western Digital itself, as the company pivots slightly from its core storage business. The company is broadening its focus from storage to focus on developing and innovating around technologies that help the world extract more value from data as a whole.

“As we see all the new applications for data and the vast possibilities, we really want to pave the path and help the industry innovate to bring all those applications to reality,” Tang concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE