On December 7, it was reported that Imagination Technologies, once a major mobile GPU factory, officially released the Catapult (meaning a catapult in Chinese) series CPU based on RISC-V. It is one of the heterogeneous computing solutions of Imagination, which aims to adapt to 5G modems, storage, and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS)/ Various heterogeneous computing scenarios such as autonomous vehicles, data centers, and high-performance computing.
There are four types of Catapult series CPUs:
Dynamic microcontroller, which has been shipped, has been used by customers on high-performance vehicle GPUs in SoC;
Real time embedded CPU, listed;
High performance application processor CPU, which will be launched in 2022;
The CPU supporting the functional safety of automobiles will be launched in 2022, developed according to the ISO 26262 vehicle specification standard, with functional safety and security performance. It claims to provide a series of CPU solutions for customers to reach each Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL).
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Catapult series CPUs are based on RISC-V open source architecture. The whole system is multi-threaded architecture, with 32-bit and 64 bit versions. It provides a large number of options, which can be configured according to application requirements to adjust performance and energy efficiency. The limit specification can be extended to 8 asymmetric coherent cores per cluster, and accelerators can also be customized.
Imagination also released the SDK software development kit and Catapult Studio supporting the Catapult CPU. The SDK includes GCC, LLVM, GDB, optimized C library and other construction and debugging tools, including Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, MacOS, FreeRTOS and other operating systems, as well as Linux boot loader, kernel and Yocto based file system.
Catapult Studio is Imagination's IED integrated development environment. Based on Visual Studio Code, it is used for embedded and RISC-V development. It has an evaluation model for testing power consumption and energy efficiency, can provide interactive debugging, and is compatible with the gem5 emulator.
Imagination is a semiconductor IP company headquartered in the UK. It is probably best known for its PowerVR series GPUs in Apple's A-series processors (SoC of Android camp is also used, but the proportion is far less than that of the year).
In 2017, Apple embarked on the road of developing its own GPU, but at the beginning of 2020, it reached a multi-year licensing agreement with Apple. In the press release of Catapult series CPU, there are also platforms for RISC-V International Foundation, the SoC Development Department of Renesar Electronic Automobile, and analysts of Linli Group. This time, the "old nobles" are eyeing the "new market".
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