Imagination Jumps Into RISC-V with Catapult CPUs for Embedded, Application, and Automotive

Four years after selling MIPS Technologies, Imagination is back in the CPU game — and has picked the free and open source RISC-V ISA.

Gareth Halfacree
2 years agoHW101

Imagination Technologies has announced its first commercial RISC-V processor range, after selling off its MIPS division in 2017, offering models ranging from low-power microcontrollers to high-performance application processors — and even "functionally safe" variants aimed at the automotive industry.

Best known for its graphics processor product lines, and having shot to success on the back of being picked to drive Sega's ill-fated Dreamcast console, Imagination Technologies branched out into central processor products in 2013 with the acquisition of MIPS Technologies. Demand for the proprietary MIPS architecture, however, was low, and in 2017 Imagination sold its MIPS division — an arm which now, under the ownership of Wave Computing, is itself working on RISC-V parts after the sudden closure of its rival MIPS Open Initiative.

Imagination's first commercial parts built around the free and open-source RISC-V architecture, dubbed Catapult, are split into four key families. The first are microcontroller-focused, and have already begun shipping inside Imagination SoCs for the automotive market; the second are real-time embedded CPUs, launched this week; the third are high-performance application processors, which will launch alongside the fourth family of functionally-safe automotive processors some time next year.

Imagination's new Catapult RISC-V IP scales from single-core to eight-core clusters, the company promises. (📹: Imagination Technologies)

"As the demand for compute grows in the cloud, at the edge and in devices, there is an ever-greater challenge to process immense amounts of data in tightly constrained area and power budgets," says Imagination's Tim Mamtora. "Heterogeneous architectures are key to providing performance, flexibility and resilience when accelerating an increasingly diverse set of workloads. Our new CPU cores allow us to better meet these needs by bringing to market a comprehensive range of outstanding RISC-V solutions that complement our world-class GPU, neural network, and Ethernet products."

Catapult CPUs are available in 32-bit and 64-bit variants, the company has confirmed, and scale from single- to eight-core clusters. Naturally, Imagination is pushing hard for the CPU IP to be used alongside its existing GPU and accelerator IP. The IP ships alongside a software development kit and a custom integrated development environment dubbed Catapult Studio.

"RISC-V welcomes Imagination’s introduction of a line of RISC-V CPUs," says RISC-V International chief executive Calista Redmond. "These products by Imagination underline the growth of the RISC-V marketplace and its ecosystem of suppliers and their industry partners. Imagination demonstrates the rich and diversified opportunities that exist in RISC-V solutions targeting heterogeneous computing."

Imagination had its own CPU division, MIPS Technologies, but sold it in 2017. (📹: Imagination Technologies)

Where the underlying instruction set architecture is open source, however, Imagination has not announced plans to release its implementation under any such license — unlike companies including Alibaba's T-Head division and storage giant Western Digital, which have both released permissively-licensed open source RISC-V core designs.

More details on the Catapult family are available on Imagination's website now — and interested parties can apply for a "deep dive" into as-yet unannounced Catapult parts on signing of a non-disclosure agreement.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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