this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Seems like a cool project, but with such weak specs what can one actually do with this?
The specs are literally the reason why people would buy this. It's basically the best device we have available that can be used as a base for devices handling secure computation, or software handling secure computation. Think of a FIDO2 key, or a gpg smartcard, all secure and verifiable
Ehhhh... I'd recommend a Teensy instead, or a variety of other microprocessors. At $72, this is awful value. And there seems to be no specifications with regards to power-consumption.
https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html
Teensy 4.1 gives you Hardware Floating point, 100 MBit Ethernet, USB, 600MHz, 1024kB of SRAM, 7MB of Flash for like $35 and within ~100mA of current usage at this 600MHz speed, meaning it easily runs off of AA Batteries for over a day with just a bit of idle/sleep cycles.
there are use cases, such as security, where you want as few instructions as possible, so a full ARM processor isn't the best idea. You may want to read the threat model page: https://tillitis.se/products/threat-model/
On the contrary, RISC-V is typically bigger and less efficient than Cortex-M7 on the Teensy.
There are 10-cent ARM Cortex M0+ processors (M0+ being the smallest ARM). M7 is kinda-small. ARM scales to different sizes and power-efficiencies.
in this case the instruction set is extremely small (and includes open source verilog, so you could even fab it yourself)
quote from the website:
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0646/c/The-Cortex-M7-Instruction-Set/Instruction-set-summary
So is the Cortex M7. The entirety of the M0+, M4, and M7 microcontroller cores are very, very small ARMs.
Hmmm. Okay, so its an FPGA Risc-V then.
That's kind of sad, that means there's no hope that its as power-efficient as a proper ASIC core like ARM-M7.