Comparative Analysis of Performance and Energy with Image Processing on Space Processors

As more capable hardware reaches orbit, understanding its performance characteristics is critical for developing novel space applications. Often, radiation-hardened (rad-hard) devices are used for critical missions in the harsh space environment. Rad-hard systems may be replaced in some scenarios with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices that offer increased performance at the expense of reliability. Many of these devices are based on ARM architectures, including the Cortex-A9, A53, and A72. Interest is also growing around using RISC-V platforms in spaceflight. This research examines the performance of these architectures on a suite of image-processing applications, such as edge detection, image downsampling, and template matching. These applications are compared in terms of execution time, parallel efficiency, and energy consumption. Modern COTS architectures outperform rad-hard devices by over [Formula: see text] speedup. The PowerPC and ARM Cortex-A53 devices demonstrate the best parallel efficiency. While the Cortex-A72 measures the lowest overall energy consumption, the RISC-V and ARM Cortex-A systems are competitive on dynamic energy, and the RISC-V achieves the lowest dynamic power. Parallelism improves performance for onboard processing while reducing overall energy consumption, enabling increased capability. This assessment supports space software developers deploying the latest applications for novel mission requirements.