Comparative energy awareness and performance analysis of ARM and RISC-V SHA-256 hardware acceleration on the RP2350
摘要
SHA-256 is a fundamental hashing algorithm in embedded security, authentication, data integrity verification, and hardware random number generation in resource-constrained systems. This paper presents a quantitative benchmarking study of SHA-256 on the Raspberry Pi RP2350, a microcontroller which has integrated both ARM Cortex-M33 and RISC-V Hazard3 cores on a single die, enabling a direct same-silicon architectural comparison under identical conditions. Throughput, execution time, current draw, and energy per kilobyte were measured across software and hardware-accelerated modes with and without Direct Memory Access on both cores, and against a software baseline on the predecessor RP2040. Hardware acceleration yielded speedups of 14.05