Seagate, best known for its hard drives, has made a new, perhaps even surprising, conquest. The company has released its first own RISC-V cores.

RISC-V cores optimized for Seagate’s storage solutions are the result of years of collaboration with RISC-V International. More efficient than the company’s cores, it has already been time to commercialize it into a ready-made circuit, which has been demonstrated as the company’s hard disk controller. The low-power but clearly smaller core is still the finishing touches just before the actual manufacture.

The built-in security features of the RISC-V architecture are praised for improving the reliability and security of existing hard drives in a variety of operating environments. The area-optimized smaller core will be widely configurable for different needs and will be best suited for auxiliary and background tasks, as well as for the activities required by the new generation of cryptography.

A more efficient kernel, in turn, is said to provide three times the performance of real-time hard disk controller tasks compared to the current offering. The additional power will be utilized, for example, to further improve the accuracy of the read heads, which is one of the intermediate steps on the way to the company’s goal of more than 50 terabytes of hard drive by 2026.

Sources: Seagate, Tom’s Hardware