Western Digital to Use RISC-V for Controllers, Processors | Hacker News Reader

Western Digital to Use RISC-V for Controllers, Processors

anandtech.com

78 pointsvanburen17 comments

This seems highly related to https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-..., posted here on HN as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044.

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?

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture that is freely available for use. That is, it specifies the instructions and instruction encodings used by a CPU, like x86 and ARM. Unlike x86 and ARM, you don't need to license the ISA to create cores implementing it.

RISC-V cores are not from a specific manufacturer.

17 days ago, Western Digital announce "Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15801044

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.

I think your comment there was downvoted, correctly, for implying that having a RISC-V microcontroller in the hard drive would be more dangerous from a security standpoint than the ARM or MIPS microcontroller it was replacing.

I've learned to not give a rat's ass about downvoters. If I could change something I'd maybe remove the anonymity or at least enforce a response comment on the reason for downvoting, so that it becomes more informative and less of a hobby for trigger happy lurkers.

Back on the topic, WD also manufactures media players, but surely not over a billion per year.

I am relatively new here, obviously I don't have enough karma points to down vote, but even if I did, I wouldn't down vote for an opposing view point. This is one thing I don't like about the commenting system here. It discourages people from presenting their opinion without worrying about getting down voted. Secondly, I would expect people who have accumulated enough karma points to down vote, to have an open mind about entertaining different takes on the matters being discussed.

> I've learned to not give a rat's ass about downvoters.

Well. I wouldn't care that much too.

BUT HN comment rely on an invisible karma value and if it is below a certain threshold, the accounts "suffers" aka, certain functions have no visible effect. Then suddenly upvoting other comments/stories doesn't do anything (looks fine to you, but doesn't increase the value for everyone but you) and your comments start with an (invisible) negative score, so you will find your comments instantly on the bottom, almost no matter how many upvotes. It's an intransparent system, and it used to be more transparent, when HN was still open source software. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's how I experienced it and put together the puzzle. I certainly would prefer if there would be only upvotes (like Facebook) and no downvotes/flagging - it doesn't work anymore, the community got too big and changed.

Only people with a karma above a certain level can downvote comments. I expect it to be adjusted over time, as people acquire more karma.

> Correct me if I am wrong, but that's how I experienced it and put together the puzzle

Assuming I understand you, that's wrong. PG always had two different versions of HN. The open-source one was a working subset of the production one, but only a subset, and there were always aspects that weren't public—necessarily so, to avoid abuse and gaming of the system. Moreover there were always downvotes and flags, or at least from very early on.

I see a comment by Symmetry saying essentially that, and it wasn't downvoted. I then see your later comment which is not saying that, but instead wondering if they will be used to create "smart HDs" and run full OSs like Minix.

An embedded multi-tasking OS inside the device opens up a lot of interesting applications. And vulnerabilities.

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...

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.

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.

ARM survived from the BBC micro days to its current resurgence thanks to supplying microcontrollers in billions of devices. Those cores aren't sexy but they are important and they result in the sort of economies of scale that let you invade application processor land from below, as ARM did.

You can be assured that when ARM marketing material brags about how many cores they licence they mention all the processors in microwaves, etc, too.

I think the point is that Western Digital didn't need to make this announcement except for taking advantage of the free marketing force behind the word "RISC-V". Most people don't even know that there are CPUs inside HDD/SDDs/memories and whether these use RISC-V or Arm or x86 won't impact the end consumer at all.

I think the announcement was actually very important, though I agree it was prone to misinterpretation. When I first learned about RISC-V I thought "Wow, I really could have used this thing during my thesis" but while it was obviously destined for success in the world of research I was skeptical that it would see any commercial uptake. But with NVidia's and now especially WD's announcements that they're using it in products suddenly it seems much less risky for other companies to incorporate RISC-V designs in their own products. I don't think this is of much practical significance to the average reader of HN but there are people for whom this announcement is very important in a fairly immediate way. And those people are, in turn, very significant to the future of RISC-V.

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