GreenWaves Technologies Announces GAP9 IoT Application Processor with Major Improvements Over GAP8
Following on from the success of the GAP8, GreenWaves' RISC-V-powered GAP9 aims to pump up the performance and cut down on the power needs.
GreenWaves Technologies has announced the follow-up to its RISC-V-based GAP8 application processor for the Internet of Things (IoT) — and it is unsurprisingly called the GAP9.
Designed for high performance yet low-power compute at the edge, GreenWaves' GAP8 has been available for a while. The GAP9, unsurprisingly, is designed to offer everything the GAP8 does but more so — beginning with a major reduction in power draw to just 50mW, the company claims.
Despite such a low power consumption, the GAP9 is designed to offer the performance required for edge AI: GreenWaves that, implemented on GlobalFoundries' 22nm FDX manufacturing process, the GAP9 offers up to 50 giga-operations per second (GOPS) and 41.6GB/s of peak cluster memory bandwidth. It also includes floating-point support across all cores, a new feature for the GAP family, using a transprecision floating-point unit supporting 8-, 16-, and 32-bit precision. The design includes support for vectorisation of floating-point and fixed-point arithmetic, too, the latter for 2- and 4-bit operations.
"GAP9 enables a new level of capabilities for embedding combinations of sophisticated machine learning and signal processing capabilities into consumer, medical and industrial product applications," explains Loic Lietar, chief executive of GreenWaves Technologies. "The GAP family provides product designers with a powerful, flexible solution for bringing the next generation of intelligent devices to market."
Other features of the GAP9 include bidirectional, multi-channel, synchronized digital audio interfaces, MIPI CSI2 and parallel camera interfaces for low-resolution scene analysis followed by high-resolution capture and detail analysis, hardware AES128 and AES256 cryptography, a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) for secure identification, and support for neural networks some ten times larger than its predecessor.
GreenWaves is currently showcasing GAP9 at the RISC-V Summit in San Jose, California; the company has not yet announced commercial availability.