Imagination Launches RISC-V CPU Family
December 07, 2021
News
Imagination Technologies announced Catapult, a RISC-V CPU product line designed from the ground-up for next-generation heterogeneous compute needs.
Based on RISC-V, the open-source CPU architecture, Imagination’s Catapult CPUs can be configured for performance, efficiency, or balanced profiles, making them suitable for a wide range of markets. Catapult CPUs are available in four distinct families: dynamic microcontrollers; real-time embedded CPUs; high-performance application CPUs; and functionally-safe automotive CPUs.
Catapult CPUs are engineered for markets ranging across 5G modems, storage, ADAS / autonomous vehicles, data center, and high-performance computing. They are multi-threaded and come in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants, though they can be configured to a customer's application requirements. They can be scaled up to eight asymmetric coherent cores-per cluster for enhanced SoC versatility, with an option to add custom accelerators.
Part of Imagination’s heterogeneous compute solution, Catapult CPUs complement the company's GPU, AI, and Ethernet Packet Processor (EPP) cores. With the early availability of performance models, SoC manufacturers can now model their application needs and choose the right compute elements. For instance, Catapult Automotive CPUs are developed to the ISO 26262 standard and provide a range of ASIL-rated CPU solutions. All, however, are built on industry-proven security concepts to ease end-market certification.
The latest imagination IP can be delivered with fast or performance simulation models, which affords developers interactive debug and power testing capabilities via the gem5 simulator.
Catapult CPUs are delivered with a fully-featured SDK, which includes enhanced versions of industry-standard build and debug tools such as GCC, LLVM, and GDB, optimized C libraries, and Imagination’s Catapult Studio IDE. The Catapult SDK is available for Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, and MacOS and includes both FreeRTOS and full Linux support with reference bootloaders, kernels, and Yocto-based filesystems. The Catapult Studio IDE, on the other hand, is based on Visual Studio Code with extra features focused on embedded RISC-V development.
And because Catapult CPUs are compliant with the RISC-V ISA, they are also fully supported by the broad and increasing RISC-V ecosystem of software and tools.
The first family of microcontrollers is already shipping in high-performance automotive SoCs from Imagination GPU customers. Real-time embedded CPUs are available now, and high-performance application CPUs and Automotive CPUs will follow in 2022 and beyond.
For more information, visit: www.imaginationtech.com/cpu.
