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Western Digital is beginning to use in-house controllers in its new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs, but has confirmed that they do not contain RISC-V cores just yet:
Western Digital has announced their first client NVMe SSDs with their SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. These drives are also the first to feature Western Digital's new in-house NVMe SSD controllers. This is a major shift in strategy away from third-party controllers (mostly Marvell) toward complete vertical integration.
The new SSDs are called the Western Digital SN720 and Western Digital SN520. Branding for these is a bit of a mess with the drives bearing the Western Digital name and model numbers that almost fit in with the HGST Ultrastar SN200 and SN260 enterprise NVMe SSDs, but the product information is on the SanDisk website and the target market is similar to that of SanDisk's business/OEM drives like the X400 and X600 SATA SSDs. Western Digital may be trying to unify and simplify their several brands, but it's a work in progress.
[...] Western Digital hasn't disclosed what kind of processor cores are used in their NVMe controllers, but they did confirm that these aren't using the RISC-V architecture—those products won't be arriving until next year at the earliest. The Western Digital NVMe controllers are probably using ARM Cortex-R cores like most SSD controllers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 03 2018, @04:31AM
It's a pretty significant problem if you're building a desktop box. Half a dozen NVMe slots take up a whole lot more room on a motherboard than half a dozen sata ports and they have to be located somewhere that's not blocking air coming off the video card(s) or CPU.
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