Wednesday, October 22, 2014

52 Things: Number 3: Computational and storage power of different form factors

This is the third in a series of blog posts to address the list of '52 Things Every PhD Student Should Know' to do Cryptography. The set of questions has been compiled to give PhD candidates a sense of what they should know by the end of their first year. We will be presenting answers to each of the questions over the next year, one per week, and I am the student assigned to the third question:
Q3: Estimate the relative computational and storage capabilities of
  • a smart-card
  • a micro-controller (i.e. a sensor node)
  • an embedded or mobile computer (e.g., a mobile phone or PDA)
  • a laptop- or desktop-class computer.
To measure the computational capability of a device we could assess the clock speed of its processors. This may be misleading if the processor enables some form of parallelism---two cores running at 2 GHz obviously possess more computational power than a single core running at 2 GHz, and so finding a direct quantitative measure is not a realistic expectation. For specific devices like general purpose graphics cards, often the total FLOPS (floating point operations per second) the device is capable of sustaining is reported (for either single or double precision arithmetic) but even this measure is not a particularly reliable choice when applied to any given problem---indeed, some services facilitate a comparison by benchmarking the performance of different devices on a variety of problem instances---see, for example, CompuBench. Fortunately the range of capabilities of the devices included in the question makes a sufficient answer less dependent on quantitative metrics.
A measure for the storage capabilities of each device is much simpler to find: we can simply compare the approximate number of bytes of information the device is capable of holding on permanent storage.
A smart-card is the least computationally powerful device: obviously clock speeds vary for different implementations, but one might expect to see around a 20 MHz core speed. In terms of storage, a typical smart-card might have around 2 kilobytes (KiB) available.
A microcontroller is "a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals" [1]. The range of storage and compute capability available will vary significantly according to the exact definition of microcontroller, but taking the suggested sensor node as an example, a typical microcontroller is likely to have similar computational capabilities as a smart-card and slightly more storage available, perhaps in the order of a few KiB to a few megabytes (MiB).
A mobile computer such as a mobile phone has significantly more storage and computing power, and the amount of power available is rapidly increasing over time. Taking the 2008 iPhone and the 2013 Nexus 5 phone as an example, the iPhone used a 412 MHz 32-bit RISC ARM core, and the Nexus 5 CPU used is a 2.3 GHz quad-core processor. In terms of storage, if we ignore the ability of some phones to use removable storage, then a high-end phone in 2013 might expect to provide in the order of 16 to 32 gigabytes (GiB) of storage
Finally, most laptop or desktop class computers are likely to have more processing power than a mobile phone: the high-end Intel "Haswell" i7 4960K processor contains 4 cores each clocked at 4 GHz, and the AMD "Piledriver" FX-9590 CPU contains 8 cores at 4.7 GHz---note that a direct comparison between these two processors requires more than just assessing core counts and clock speeds! There are other factors that can affect the computing capabilities of a desktop or laptop computer---in particular, the addition of a graphics processing unit can, for certain problems, provide a large increase in performance. The storage capacity of a laptop or desktop can vary tremendously, but a typical amount of storage in a consumer machine might be between hundreds of gigabytes and several terabytes (TiB)---the largest single hard drive capacities are now around 8 TiB.
  • [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcontroller

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