Can anybody name a single value point that the CTO org added in the past 2.5 years? WTF is risc-V how is it related to WD core business?
Can not believe WD CTO does not even have a bachelor degree (but do somehow get a MBA degree). Not surprising that WDC is far behind in technology across the board.
On the plus side, after one VP left WD device org three VPs showed up. That is way to go and grow ...
I see a lot of smack talking about eSSD. The reality is - oh who am I kidding, you're dead right. The whole BU is managed like joke. Zero innovation is even possible, let alone allowed. If you have a voice in eSSD you will be snuffed out by the time you finish your first sentence. If you do something right, you are public enemy #1. If you do something wrong, you will take the fall for every error made 3 levels up from you. They build the errors up until a fsll guy presents himself.
Any chance they have of good products gets destroyed as soon as it touches Penang, who are single handedly responsible for the fact that eSS hasn't released a single new product since aquiring SanDisk. But the SVPs are too busy playing golf together to give a hoot. Penang puts together a pretty power point blaming everyone else for why it didn't work, the market window closes, the product is cancelled, then they rinse and repeat.
All the while the executive team sits there like vegitables with their mouths open dripping drool on their $500 shirts wondering what went wrong. Penang is what went wrong. Period. And when the world is shoveling the ashes of WD into the trash can those Malaysian con men will be sipping wine coolers on the door steps of Micron accross the street, happy as clams because they could give two big brown ones about WD or any of the 60,000 people that will crash and burn with it.
But I digress. I hate my job.
If you are a big cloud costumer, the first few questions to ask a SSD supplier will be: who is your controller vendor? If your answer is WD is the controller supplier, they may ask you to leave and take your SSD drives with you.
Why would a big cloud customer put their trust in the SSD controller from WD that has no past success track record in enterprise? This whole strategy costed three years of product delay and zero hope of turning the tide.
WD had a fanfare of announcing enterprise SSD SN640, even saying revenue starting Q3 ‘19.
A closer check on reality revealed that SN640 is still in vapor ware stage (I.e. no meaningful revenue). WD enterprise SSD looks like an amateur play - just not up to the level hat enterprise requires
CTO (now former) is the biggest joke in high tech industry. It is literally a laughing stock.
Even if one pisses randomly, you won’t miss the target as much as the CTO ORG.
There is no CTO anymore. He's re-retired.
WD's ISA is for 32-bit in-order design with a 2-way superscalar architecture and a 9-stage pipeline- supposedly they want to use it for controllers (ssd and hdd?). never was clear who would make the silicon, though. While they mention AI, IoT, ML, etc., WD's design appears pretty low scale (i.e. can't touch tensor cores). I thought the memory coherency over ethernet fabric was more interesting myself- though again, nothing to get excited about from pure computing.
Martin apparently never really understood what a 'von Neumann architecture' is- confused by implementation compared to theory. Which, i guess, led to his push at HPE about 'the Machine' which was abandoned less than a year after he 'retired'. I assume he's really talking about the 'von Neumann bottleneck', but RISC doesn't address that. More buses to main memory would.
As for the CTO group- well, they appeared to have eliminated everything other than MRAM type memory. In theory, this should be in WD's wheelhouse, but it will come down to critical mass which the group doesn't have. Essentially trying to play catch-up w/ the competition.
How can WDC allow the CTO and its dysfunctional organization bulls**t around for so long? Who hired this guy?
After all of bragging in technology leadership “continued leadership”, the realities are
SN620 is a joke in terms of enterprise SSD. SN630 was half of joke and did not see meaningful market acceptance. SN640 was just announced but not sure how it actually works at enterprise level.
RISC-V has been designed by University of California, Berkeley.
Western Digital simply adopted CPU for own projects.
Actually, the best RISC-V is from Alibaba (yet another adopter).
WD CTO is joke and not sure what his role is.
LOL. The CTO ORG has been filled with id–ts and contributed literally nothing but distractions and cost centers to WD.
WD did announce a RISC-V open source CPU core design. It is free for anybody to use the design. Who in their right mind will use CPU design from WD? This whole initiative is a f@&ki?g joke, from the beginning to the end.