New smartphone SIM card has faster embedded CPU core — single RISC-V core claimed to help deliver 10x storage, 10x faster transfers, improved security
China Mobile has announced its upcoming CC2560A "super SIM card", the world's first SIM card with a RISC-V core onboard. The CC2560A is an IoT product which improves on every aspect of a traditional SIM card: more storage, better security algorithms, and new functionality like NFC support.
China Mobile, the largest mobile provider in the world, held a 5G IoT product conference on Wednesday. Among other IoT solutions and new releases, China Mobile announced the RISC-V super SIM. Powered by a single RISC-V core running at 120 MHz, the company claims the new SIM offers ten times the communication rate of a standard SIM card, around two times the rate of current high-end super SIMs already seeing use in the IoT field. The RISC-V SIM's onboard flash storage capacity of 2.5MB is also ten times larger than a standard SIM's storage and twice that of other super SIMs.
Unfortunately for the power phone users in the audience, average users will not be seeing the RISC-V super SIM in their devices anytime soon — not least because the card is a China Mobile exclusive which will possess intense security features and encryption. SIM cards are needed anytime a device needs to be uniquely identified over a network; the use case we are all familiar with is as an identifier within a smartphone to our phone carriers.
