Exploring Storage Device Characteristics of A RISC-V Little-core SoC

Abstract

Low-power system-on-chips (SoCs) dominate the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, which consists of billions of devices that can generate Zettabytes of data. SoC directly interacts with big data, but there is little research on its storage performance and power consumption characteristics, especially the lack of quantitative evaluation. In this paper, we study the storage characteristics of a low-power RISC-V SoC FPGA. Specifically, we deploy a PCIe SSD to study the performance of storage devices under little cores. We quantitatively evaluate device bandwidth, IOPS throughput, and power consumption. In addition, we compare the same device on the low-power RISC-V SoC and a high-performance x86 server to observe the similarities and differences of the storage device behavior on different computing platforms.