Unisoc, formerly Spreadtrum, a well-known developer of various application processors from China, has introduced what it claims to be the world’s first security chip based on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture (ISA). The E450R is said to offer significant performance for security algorithms, reports IT Home.
The key feature of the E450R is its asymmetric cryptographic PKE algorithm engine, which is said to work 50% faster than on the predecessor. Even when the key length is increased, the chip maintains its performance, ensuring robust security without sacrificing speed, according to the source report. The E450R also offers a 50% improvement in typical transaction-based applications, which makes the chip particularly suitable for high-demand environments where quick processing is crucial, IT Home claims.
In addition to its cryptographic enhancements, the E450R offers a 15% boost in the erase/write speed of its non-volatile memory (NVM). This improvement allows the chip to store more data within the same time frame, making it more efficient for applications requiring frequent memory operations.
The thing that makes Unisoc particularly proud is the use of the open-source RISC-V ISA. This allowed the company to tailor its processing cores for its workloads, offering more performance at lower power compared to the traditional approach when using off-the-shelf Arm R that leverages a lot of legacy features to maintain ISA integrity, to ensure compatibility with a range of software. This takes die space and power, unlike the case of RISC-V. Given the fact that Unisoc provides an API and maintains the software/firmware stack, there is no problem with software (in)compatibility of the E450R, at least IT Home and Unisoc do not mention this factor specifically.
Speaking of software, Unisoc claims that the chip’s tailor-made microarchitecture reduces application code size by 30% and speeds up application load time by 120%, which is crucial for real-time applications.
The E450R has already achieved several important certifications, including National Cryptography Level 2, UnionPay chip and embedded software security certifications, and the CCRC IT EAL4+ certification.
The only question we now have is can China’s secret services bypass the level of security that the Unisoc E450R offers?
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