EE Times: How to Turbo Charge Your SoC’s CPU(s)

It's no surprise that the creators of system-on-chip (SoC) devices wish to squeeze the maximum performance out of their systems. One way to do this is to use the highest-performing intellectual property (IP) cores available, including Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores. However, using the latest and greatest high-end CPU cores comes at a cost, which can be 5X to 10X more than a mid-range core.

SoC architects need to consider many design tradeoffs based on the target market and application. For every "money is no object" design, there are a thousand "we want the best we can get for the lowest possible price" embedded system projects.

Design teams using lower-cost, lower-performance processor cores must maximize efficiency. Often, they fail to take advantage of a simple solution that can turbo charge their SoC's CPU(s) by up to 32%.

Most CPU cores used in SoCs are fundamentally based on a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture. Examples are RISC-V processor cores from members of the RISC-V consortium and Arm's Cortex-A (application processor), Cortex-R (real-time processor) and Cortex-M (microcontroller processor) cores.

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