Comprehensive analysis of energy efficiency and performance of ARM and RISC-V SoCs

Abstract Over the past few years, ARM has been the dominant player in embedded systems and System-on-Chips (SoCs). With the emergence of hardware platforms based on the RISC-V architecture, a practical comparison focusing on their energy efficiency and performance is needed. In this study, our goal is to comprehensively evaluate the energy efficiency and performance of ARM and RISC-V SoCs in three different systems. We will conduct benchmark tests to measure power consumption and overall system performance. The results of our study are valuable to developers and researchers looking for the most appropriate hardware platform for energy-efficient computing applications. Our observations suggest that RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) implementations may demonstrate lower average power consumption than ARM, but this does not automatically imply a superior performance per watt ratio for RISC-V. The primary focus of the study is to evaluate and compare these ISA implementations, aiming to identify potential areas for enhancing their energy efficiency. Furthermore, to ensure the practical applicability of our findings, we will use the Computational Fluid Dynamics software OpenFOAM. This step serves to validate the relevance of our results in real-world scenarios. It allows us to fine-tune execution parameters based on the insights gained from our initial study. By doing so, we aim not only to provide meaningful conclusions but also to investigate the transferability of our results to practical applications. Our analysis will also scrutinize the capabilities of these SoCs when handling nonsynthetic software workloads, thereby broadening the scope of our evaluation.