XITC and China Mobile Research Institute jointly promote the application of RISC-V in data center scenarios

Recently, the second RISC-V China Summit was successfully held, and dozens of enterprises demonstrated their achievements in many fields, including chips, operating systems, tool chains, and development languages. RISC-V, as the third instruction set after x86 and Arm, its open source and open attribute, on the one hand, drives the innovation of the chip industry, on the other hand, also provides an important option for domestic chip autonomy and controllability.

In order to promote the maturity of diverse computing technology and ecology, China Mobile Research Institute and XITC carry out technical research to promote the maturity of enterprise solid state drive (SSD) products based on RISC-V. Xinsheng Intelligence is a leading solid-state storage master control and solution design enterprise in China, and started the development of the first generation of RISC-V based SATA SSD in 2019.

SSD performance depends on the coordination of the master, firmware, and NAND particles. The main control industry generally adopts Arm architecture, with 32-bit RISC-V processors in the embedded field of large-scale commercial, under the same performance, the use of RISC-V architecture for the main control will be conducive to improving the autonomy and controllability of enterprises. In the early stage, China Mobile Research Institute and Xinsheng Intelligence focused on technical cooperation in the main control chip and firmware, and jointly promoted the optimization of products in multi-level cache architecture and clock timing. Based on the same whole machine test environment (CPU, memory, network card, etc., the same configuration), the XITC SS3000 hard disk with 480G capacity of Xinsheng Intelligent is compared with a foreign similar product, and the results show that the performance of the two is comparable. Xinsheng Intelligent XITC SS3000 has the advantages of higher steady-state write IOPS, lower steady-state write latency and lower power consumption.

China Mobile Research Institute will continue to conduct joint technical research with XITC to further enhance product capabilities. First, the data transmission rate will be further improved, and the RISC-V main control chip and NVMe SSD products based on PCIe5.0 will be jointly researched. The second is to jointly promote the next generation of products to support the NVMe-oF protocol and support the whole machine compatibility with AI servers.

In the future, China Mobile will take the responsibility of chain leader as its responsibility and rely on the core nest incubation platform to evaluate the performance of SSDS based on RISC-V master control in various business scenarios and provide targeted optimization suggestions; In addition, for CPU, DPU and other scenarios, we continue to work with industry partners to tackle key problems, and draw the industry to develop enterprise-class data center products with higher performance, and prosper the domestic computing ecosystem.