Following up on our previous reporting on the changes at UK-based
Imagination Technologies, the company announced a new RISC-V applications processor IP, the Imagination APXM-6200 CPU, at the 2024 Embedded World conference. The applications processor is focused on performance density, which is typically called an efficiency core. The target markets for the CPU include consumer and industrial devices and will eventually include an automotive version. The new CPU is part of the company’s Catapult CPU IP portfolio.
While the RISC-V applications processor market is becoming crowded, Imagination is focused on targeting segments of the market that the Arm embedded cores have traditionally addressed rather than trying to compete with fellow RISC-V vendors, such as Andes and SiFive. The Arm CPU market is still far larger than the current RISC-V market.
As part of Imagination’s RISC-V solution, the company offers the Catapult software development kit (SDK) for embedded developers. The application development software now includes a new set of RISC-V vector compute libraries to boost performance for AI workloads. The company also offers a Catapult Studio extension for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Integrated Development Environment (IDE). QEMU (Quick Emulator) and Catapult software models allow developers to build and run RISC-V software ahead of hardware availability. For development and debug, the company is partnering with Lauterbach and ProvenRun for TEE certification.
The company has worked to ease the migration from Arm with porting guides, a Neon to RISC-V vector migration tool, industry standard security systems, and the ability to deliver trusted execution environment certification.
Imagination claims that the APXM-6200 is Android and Linux ready. In particular, the APXM-6200 is compliant to the RISC-V RVA22 profile with vector and vector cryptography support, which is the first Android target profile for Google.