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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"
by sweden 9y ago
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.
- Symmetry 9y agoI 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.