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