Embedded computing startup Efficient has unveiled its first standalone processor, the Electron E1 — which, its creators claim, offers “up to 100×” the energy efficiency of Arm Cortex-M33 and Cortex-M85 chips.
“Based on a decade’s worth of research at Carnegie Mellon University, we built our Fabric architecture from the ground up to deliver radically better energy efficiency for general-purpose computing applications,” claims Efficient’s Adam Kaufman of the company’s launch. “The Electron E1 processor is built on this spatial dataflow architecture, which executes general-purpose code while eliminating the need for costly step-by-step computation. The result is up to 100× improvement in energy efficiency over traditional low-power CPUs, enabling intelligent applications at the edge with years-long lifespans in environments where power and maintenance are limited.”
Efficient claims its Electron E1 chip, built atop the in-house Fabric architecture, can deliver up to a hundredfold efficiency gains for embedded systems. (📹: Efficient)
The first standalone implementation of Efficient’s Fabric architecture, the Electron E1 is claimed to deliver 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 part includes 128kB of ultra-low-power cache memory, split into 8kB banks, 3MB of static RAM (SRAM), and 4MB of magnetoresistive memory (MRAM) as non-volatile storage, in place of higher-power flash memory.
The processor’s scalar core, installed alongside the proprietary Fabric hardware, is designed around the free and open source RISC-V architecture, implementing the RV32IAC set plus the Zmmul extension for more efficient multiplication operations. The chip runs on a 1.8VDC supply voltage with selectable internal operating voltage between 0.55–0.8VDC. There are a total of 72 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, six quad-SPI, six UART, and six I2C buses, plus an on-board real-time clock (RTC).
In-house, but as-yet unverified, benchmarks show big efficiency gains for the E1 against Arm Cortex-M85 and Cortex-M33 parts. (📷: Efficient)
It’s the efficiency that is the chip’s real selling point, though — naturally enough, given the company’s name. Efficient claims that between the Fabric architecture and a co-designed compiler dubbed effcc the Electron E1 can deliver an order order of magnitude energy efficiency gain — or more — over equivalent Arm parts. For matrix multiplication, Efficient claims a 94× improvement over the Arm Cortex-M85 and 15× over the more efficient Cortex-M33; for fast Fourier transformers, a 24× and 13× gain respectively; for convolution operations in computer vision, a whopping 322× improvement over the Cortex-M85 and a still-impressive 29× over the Cortex-M33.
More information on the Electron E1, performance claims for which have yet to be independently validated, is available on the Efficient website; pricing had not been made public at the time of writing.