The Constructive Anarchist

The world  of SSD drives is fast evolving. What started as a opaque replacement of rotating rust in a SATA drive with flash  soon became slightly less opaque with addition of features like TRIM and we move have NVMe drives which dump HDD related semantics and offer significantly more performance. But the world of SSDs is just beginning to evolve and efforts like our own Lightstor effort ( www.lightstor.org , www.bitbucket.org/casl ) indicate the myriad possibilities in the world of SSDs. While all drives get dumped under the rubric of SSDs, it is probably time to have some semi-formal taxonomy for the various types of drives. So I propose the following (very unimaginative but functional) naming convention. I am also assuming the SATA interfaces are irrelevant going forward and hence do not have to be dealt with, teh assumption being that flash and its successors (SCM, NVRAM) will use some SERDES based IO/memory bus or DDR interfaces. Type 1 drives are legacy NVMe drives...

The SHAKTI processor program at IIT-Madras has been kind of an official program for a while now but has not been  publicized since we figured it made more sense to wait till we had some code in place.We finally made our code code-line public yesterday, so do go take a look at bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public Our RapidIO interconnect program and our lightstor SSD controller are also in the casl directory.  Currently we have released a 64 bit dual issue, OO core. This is the I-Class core, one of the six+ families of cores we plan to release. See   http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/shakti.html This is just a base core and not a full SoC. A brief run-down of the features of the core 64-bit, dual issue variant of Shakti processor family. Features a pipeline of depth of 8 stages. The 8 stages of the pipeline are - Fetch, Decode, Rename(Map), Wakeup, Select, Drive, Execute, Commit. Each of the pipeline stages takes a single cycle to execute. The core s...

As a long time votary of open source, I have been predicting the significant impact of the potent combination of ever reducing chip geometries and open source systems. These days open source HW is finally coming of age, so the term "open source" should be used to describe complete systems. Most of these "predictions" were technical. In general as a technologist, I prefer to stick to technology predictions, human societies are way too chaotic for meaningful predictions. But as an advisor to various private and govt. institutions, I have come to realize that  open source represents a powerful antidote to corruption ! The benefit arises from two factors 1. commodity HW margins are so low that it is not economically feasible to offer a bribe. Margins being what they are in the PC and server business, any "consideration" has to be marginal in nature and the risk/reward ratio gets skewed ! The flip side of course is that since all HW products being commoditi...