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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Western Digital is beginning to use in-house controllers [anandtech.com] in its new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express [wikipedia.org]) SSDs, but has confirmed that they do not contain RISC-V cores [soylentnews.org] 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 [anandtech.com] 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 [anandtech.com] 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 [anandtech.com]—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.

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