Chip-design home Sophgo has introduced a brand new pair of system-on-chip (SoC) elements focusing on edge synthetic intelligence (edge AI) workloads, combining 4 completely different processor architectures in a single machine: RISC-V, Arm, a tensor processor, and — unusually nowadays — the Intel 8051 structure.
“SG2000 is a high-performance, low-power chip designed for varied product fields akin to edge clever surveillance IP cameras, native facial recognition attendance machines, and good house units,” says embedded computing specialist Milk-V, which has partnered with Sophgo to supply boards constructed across the new chip vary, in a put up dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program. “The chip additionally integrates an in-house TPU [Tensor Processing Unit], delivering roughly 0.5 TOPS [Tera-Operations Per Second] of computing energy beneath INT8 operations.”
Sophgo has a brand new RISC-V SoC out, focusing on edge AI duties — and together with an Arm core and, oddly, an Intel 8051-compatible microcontroller. (📷: Milk-V)
The TPU is just one of 4 processor architectures in use within the Sophgo SG2000 and SG2002, the latter of which upgrades the on-board TPU coprocessor to 1 TOPS of INT8 laptop. The chips additionally embrace two 64-bit T-Head C906 RISC-V cores, one operating at 700MHz and devoted to real-time working system (RTOS) use and the opposite operating at 1GHz and focusing on Linux, a 1GHz Arm Cortex-A53 core, and — of all issues, within the twenty first century — a microcontroller core that seems to implement Intel’s 8051 structure.
Launched again in 1980, the Intel MCS-51 introduced the 8051 structure to market as an reasonably priced eight-bit microcontroller — however unique Intel elements have lengthy been discontinued. Nonetheless, that is what Sophgo has chosen for the microcontroller facet of the elements — including 6kB of devoted static RAM (SRAM) to the core for good measure and permitting the core to clock from 25MHz as much as an impressive-by-Nineteen Eighties-standard 300MHz.
In response to the information sheet, the 8051 core within the chips can run at as much as 300MHz. (📷: Sophgo)
Different options of the system-on-chip embrace a picture sign processor good for 5 megapixels at 30 frames per second, a two-lane MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) and one four- or two two-lane MIPI Digital camera Serial Interfaces (CSIs), a 16-bit audio codec with two I2S and PCM channels and a digital microphone enter, a Quick Ethernet PHY, {hardware} H.264/H.265 codecs, SPI NOR and NAND flash, eMMC 5.0, and two SDIO 3.0 storage buses, USB 2.0, and a spread of general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins together with 16 pulse-width modulation (PWM) pins, six analog to digital converter (ADC) pins, six I2C and 4 SPI buses, and 5 {hardware} UART buses.
Extra data on the chip, together with a hyperlink to obtain its Chinese language-language information sheet, is on the market on the Milk-V web site; the lower-end SG2000 mannequin was listed on the market at Arace priced at $30 for 5 chips, however on the time of writing was displaying as out of inventory.
