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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

In order to move the reader head inside your drive and to communicate with the host CPU you need microprocessors in your hard driver, really tiny ones. Now, instead of paying ARM for licences to use them WD is using open source processors that don't come with fees besides what it takes to manufacture them.

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This is the right answer...they already use ARM, they want a one-time-fee license instead of royalties. Trying to shave a little margin.

WD made it clear in there talk that this wasn't about saving on costs, but rather having control over the innovation in the data space.

I don't see any reason to doubt them. It's an incredible risk to switch their entire company over to a still-growing ISA. But being able to design and modify any particular core as they see fit without having to talk to lawyers or negotiate a new contract... that's an incredible power.

RISC-V is certainly more unencumbered, but there's always the ARM architecture license too. Pricey, but you can modify and build on a relatively more mature ISA

An architectural license doesn't give you free reign to extend the ISA, just to create your own implementation of the standard ISA.

Is this confirmed though?

Were they using ARM? ( Proberly, but may not be in everything they use ) Are they switching over from ARM? Or simply moving their inhouse controller to RISC-V?

The one time license fee were suppose to be a lot cheaper if you are shipping in billions of unit.

Because if they are switching from ARM, I think of it as ARM being lazy and not winning the battle they ought to win, purely from a business perspective.

See this: https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacki...

Not definitive for the whole product line, but at least evidence of one popular WD drive with a Marvell/ARM controller. Google "Western digital Marvell" for more...like https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marvell-achieves-si... (over one billion WD units with Marvell/ARM chips on board)

Western Digital's SanDisk SSDs almost exclusively use Marvell controllers, too.

Tiny microprocessors are there in almost all devices supporting DMA since long time right? So what this RISC-V versions will bring new to the table?

> So what this RISC-V versions will bring new to the table?

Not much, except being open, so WD can produce them without paying anyone royalties.

But in that case there would not be much of a point in making such an announcement, right? From a user perspective, I do not care at all what ISA the microcontroller inside the HDD/SSD uses, if it is not user accessible.

Unless they pass the savings on to their customers, that is. And even then, I am not so sure. Shaving a couple of cents of the price of a disk drive does not seem like a big deal to me.

Their stockholders might care, though.

Depends on what you care about, I suppose. I find it interesting, because I am interested in low-power processors.

This move, if it works well for WD, could lead to more attention being paid to a more open competitor to ARM, which would provide some competition and put downward pressure on ARM pricing. That, in turn, could have some potentially interesting second-order effects.

But yeah, if you only care about consumer prices and visible features, this is probably pretty boring stuff.

Mmmmh, now that I think of it: Does WD have their own fabs, or do they buy their chips from other vendors.

And if it's the latter - would WD buying a couple of billion chips a year have any effect on prices?

And now that you mention it - a company like WD announcing they will use RISC-V in their disks means they are serious about this, which in turn might make it easier for other to consider RISC-V a serious option.

I am very excited about RISC-V in theory, but unless somebody builds a "Raspberry-V", so to speak, it will probably be a long time before I get to play with one of these. I also think a high-performance implementation of RISC-V could make for an attractive component of a desktop machine / workstation. The Talos Raptor / II seems to be a sweet machine, but it is totally outside my budget. A less-high-end machine built around a RISC-V might change the equation.

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