Getting Into IoT Is A RISC-V Business Move

Can The APXM-6200 RISC-V CPU Take On ARM?

Imagination Technologies is hoping to snag some marketshare from ARM with their new APXM-6200 RISC-V CPU, designed to power all those smart appliances we love to hate.  The cores of the APXM-6200 are similar to how the Cortex-A series from ARM are designed, but do not depend on an ARM license.  They currently top out at four cores, reasonable to power the interface on a smart TV or toaster, however Imagination intends to scale them up to 12 cores in the future.  While the APXM-6200 lacks an L3 cache, there is 128 KB of L1 and 1MB pf L2 per core.  That isn’t quite up to the top Cortex-A chips but might also make them less expensive, which could be very attractive for companies looking at mass production of smart appliances.

Take it with a grain of salt, as these were in-house benchmarks, but The Register was told that in SpecINT2k6 the APXM-6200 outperform the Cortex-A53 by 65% and beats the newer Cortex-A510 by 14%.  The actual performance may vary, but if they can come close in real world tasks Imagination can also leverage the fact that they designed and manufactured the onboard GPU as well when trying to sell their chips to manufacturers. 

As you might expect, there is also talk of the usefulness of the APXM-6200 in AI applications, which is covered in the full article.