Imagination Announces First Details On Their New MIPS Development Board

Imagination Technologies has just lifted the embargo on their new Creator CI40 development board as the successor to the MIPS Creator CI20.

The CI40 uses a new MIPS-based chip. About the hardware, Alexandru Voica of Imagination shared with Phoronix, "The chip at the heart of the new Creator Ci40 dev board is a new design optimized specifically for IoT use cases; it has been manufactured by GLOBALFOUNDRIES on a 40nm low power process node. Whereas other boards for IoT tend to reuse chips made for mobile or networking devices, we have created (pardon the pun!) a custom IoT subsystem that has been tuned for a wide range of IoT requirements and connectivity standards. For example, the chip has built-in wireless capabilities, supporting both hi-speed Wi-Fi (802.11 ac 2x2) but also low energy Bluetooth (aka Bluetooth Smart)."

The chip is using a dual-core MIPS interAptiv CPU that features hardware multi-threading, which is similar to Intel's HT but claims lower power consumption.

Imagination will be releasing more details on the "New Creator" next month with Linux details, the following week with wireless details, and on 10 November shoukd then be the big reveal.

More details via this blog post.