Embedded computing startup Environment friendly has unveiled its first standalone processor, the Electron E1 — which, its creators declare, gives “as much as 100×” the vitality effectivity of Arm Cortex-M33 and Cortex-M85 chips.
“Primarily based on a decade’s price of analysis at Carnegie Mellon College, we constructed our Cloth structure from the bottom as much as ship radically higher vitality effectivity for general-purpose computing purposes,” claims Environment friendly’s Adam Kaufman of the corporate’s launch. “The Electron E1 processor is constructed on this spatial dataflow structure, which executes general-purpose code whereas eliminating the necessity for pricey step-by-step computation. The result’s as much as 100× enchancment in vitality effectivity over conventional low-power CPUs, enabling clever purposes on the edge with years-long lifespans in environments the place energy and upkeep are restricted.”
The primary standalone implementation of Environment friendly’s Cloth structure, the Electron E1 is claimed to ship 21.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) of compute at 200MHz when in high-voltage mode and 5.4 GOPS at 50MHz in low voltage mode. The half consists of 128kB of ultra-low-power cache reminiscence, break up into 8kB banks, 3MB of static RAM (SRAM), and 4MB of magnetoresistive reminiscence (MRAM) as non-volatile storage, rather than higher-power flash reminiscence.
The processor’s scalar core, put in alongside the proprietary Cloth {hardware}, is designed across the free and open supply RISC-V structure, implementing the RV32IAC set plus the Zmmul extension for extra environment friendly multiplication operations. The chip runs on a 1.8VDC provide voltage with selectable inner working voltage between 0.55–0.8VDC. There are a complete of 72 general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins, six quad-SPI, six UART, and 6 I2C buses, plus an on-board real-time clock (RTC).
In-house, however as-yet unverified, benchmarks present huge effectivity good points for the E1 towards Arm Cortex-M85 and Cortex-M33 components. (📷: Environment friendly)
It is the effectivity that’s the chip’s actual promoting level, although — naturally sufficient, given the corporate’s title. Environment friendly claims that between the Cloth structure and a co-designed compiler dubbed effcc the Electron E1 can ship an order order of magnitude vitality effectivity achieve — or extra — over equal Arm components. For matrix multiplication, Environment friendly claims a 94× enchancment over the Arm Cortex-M85 and 15× over the extra environment friendly Cortex-M33; for quick Fourier transformers, a 24× and 13× achieve respectively; for convolution operations in laptop imaginative and prescient, a whopping 322× enchancment over the Cortex-M85 and a still-impressive 29× over the Cortex-M33.
Extra data on the Electron E1, efficiency claims for which have but to be independently validated, is offered on the Environment friendly web site; pricing had not been made public on the time of writing.
