This seems highly related to <a href="https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-western-digital-to-accelerate-the-future-of-next-generation-computing-architectures-for-big-data-and-fast-data-environments.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-...</a>, posted here on HN as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044</a>.
What is RISC-V? I tried reading up on it but it's just not clicking. Is it just a standard and WD is building their own chips to that standard or is it front a specific manufacturer?
17 days ago, Western Digital announce "Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year":<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044</a><p>And one needed only calc one and one together to came to the conclusion WD will use RISC-V as HDD controller - yet my comment got down voted on HN. It would be better if HN only has upvotes, and no downvoting/flagging feature and instead a "report" button.
Will that help them reduce the heat and noise in their HDDs? I just replaced a WD Black with a same tier Seagate and I finally don't hear seek noise any more...<p>This is just a marketing announcement. Possibly they ran out of ways to improve their products?
I don't like the marketing BS from WD, especially the part it is calling itself a company using 1 billion cores a year. Let's be clear - those 1 billion cores run a single type of application - controller firmware. It is not remotely comparable to the rich set of applications run on devices such as smartphones.<p>Why smartphone makers don't call themselves 1 billion core company? Because they have more interesting stuff to say and more exciting products to show.