Imagination Technologies Introduces Catapult Series With RISC-V CPU Cores
British chip designer Imagination Technologies introduces a series of RISC-V CPU cores. The company is coming up with different types of RISC-V cores in its Catapult series, which are suitable for different use cases.
Imagination Technologies’ Catapult series consists of “four standalone families,” all of which are based on the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture. The company announced this during the RISC-V Summit 2021. For example, the company will come up with efficient and small RISC-V cores for microcontrollers, Anandtech also writes. The company will offer it under license to chip designers.
The first of these microcontroller cores are already being shipped in automotive GPUs from Imagination customers, the company reports. The company has also already made real-time embedded CPUs for “mainstream devices” available to its customers, although they are not currently being delivered in products. From 2022, Imagination will come up with more powerful and complex core designs, for example for high-performance applications and complete automotive SOCs.
Imagination’s Catapult cores have a “configurable and scalable design,” according to the company. Imagination writes on its website that its RISC-V series is ultimately intended for different purposes. According to the chipmaker, the cores can be used in 5G modems, storage devices, data centers, high-performance computing systems, and driver assistance systems for cars.
The first RISC-V cores presented by Imagination are multithreaded, available in 32bit and 64bit variants, and have ecc for L1 and TCM cache. The company’s customers can combine up to eight of these cores within a single cluster. It is also possible to add custom accelerators.
In the next three years, the company would introduce three more RISC-V cores, which the manufacturer says will gradually become more powerful and complex. A 64-bit core is planned for the next 9 to 12 months, which can be used in processors with support for ‘extended operating systems, including Linux’. The company is also coming with an out-of-order core, which will be used in more powerful processors.
Slides on the Imagination Catapult series. Images by Imagination Technologies, via Anandtech