Imagination Announces "Catapult" RISC-V CPU Family

With Imagination Technologies having sold off what was MIPS Technologies several years ago and that CPU architecture having been abandoned now, Imagination today announced "Catapult" as their new family of RISC-V processor IP.

Imagination's Catapult is a line of RISC-V CPUs designed for heterogeneous compute and are offered in different versions to fit varying performance / efficiency needs. Catapult CPUs are also available in different families for dynamic microcontrollers, real-time embedded CPUs, high performance application CPUs, and automotive CPUs.

The Catapult RISC-V CPU cores can be paired with Imagination's GPU, AI, and neural network accelerator / EPP cores. Imagination's Catapult SDK will support Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS as well as having reference software implementations for FreeRTOS and Yocto-based Linux.

Catapult will be available in up to eight RISC-V cores per cluster. Imagination didn't share any performance claims as part of today's announcement.

As for availability the initial low-power designs are available now while the higher-performance family won't be available until into 2020, "The first family, microcontrollers, are already shipping in high-performance automotive GPUs in SoCs from Imagination customers. Real-time embedded CPUs are available now. High-performance application CPUs and Automotive CPUs will follow from 2022."

More details at ImaginationTech.com.