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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by zokier on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @05:31PM (#15802506)
> Western Digital plans to transition future core, processor, and controller development to the RISC-V architecture. The company currently consumes over one billion processor cores on an annual basis across its product portfolio. The transition will occur gradually and once completely transitioned, Western Digital expects to be shipping two billion RISC-V cores annually

I think that paragraph captures pretty well what they are doing; basically swapping out their current (proprietary) cores for RISC-V cores. I don't see any indication that the processors would be any more user accessible than current controllers. Considering the numbers presented, simply doubling the number of cores seems fairly conservative estimate, they will probably do that without any major paradigm shifts.

Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by simcop2387 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @07:44PM (#15803489)
That said, it's not like they're user inaccessible either.

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by jsmthrowaway on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @06:29PM (#15803013)
To be fair, it is strange that they broke out core, processor, and controller as separate items in that verbiage. They're probably referring to the application processors in My Cloud, external drives, and so on.