Imagination Launches Catapult Family of RISC-V CPU Cores: Breaking Into Heterogeneous SoCs

Lightwreather · December 6, 2021

Summary

The RISC-V Summit, which is being put on by the Linux Foundation, always tends to feature some new product announcements, and this year is no different, as Imagination Technologies is at the show to provide details on their first RISC-V CPU cores, along with announcing their intentions to develop a full suite of CPU cores over the next few years.

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The company, currently best known for their PowerVR GPU lineup, has been dipping their toes into the RISC-V ecosystem for the last couple of years with projects like RVfpga. More recently, this past summer the company revealed in an earnings call that they would be designing RISC-V CPU cores, with more details to come. Now at the RISC-V summit they’re providing those details and more, with the formal announcement of their Catapult family of RISC-V cores, as well as outlining a heterogeneous computing-centric roadmap for future development.

Starting from the top, the Catapult family is Imagination’s overarching name for a complete family of RISC-V CPU cores, the first of which are launching today. Imagination has (and is) designing multiple microarchitectures in order to cover a broad range of performance/power/area (PPA) needs, and the Catapult family is slated to encompass everything from microcontroller-grade processors to high-performance application processors. All told, Imagination’s plans for the fully fleshed out Catapult family look a lot like Arm’s Cortex family, with Imagination preparing CPU core designs for microcontrollers (Cortex-M), real-time CPUs (Cortex-R), high performance application processors (Cortex-A), and functionally safe CPUs (Cortex-AE). Arm remains the player to beat in this space, so having a similar product structure should help Imagination smooth the transition for any clients that opt to disembark for Catapult.

At present, Imagination has finished their first CPU core design, which is a simple, in-order core for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. The in-order Catapult core is being used for microcontrollers as well as real-time CPUs, and according to the company, Catapult microcontrollers are already shipping in silicon as part of automotive products. Meanwhile the real-time core is available to customers as well, though it’s not yet in any shipping silicon.

For 2022 the company is planning to release an enhanced version of the in-order core as an application processor-grade design, complete with support for “rich” OSes like Linux. And in 2023 that will be followed by another, even higher performing in-order core for the real-time and application processor markets. Finally, the company is also developing a much more complex out-of-order RISC-V core design as well, which is expected in the 2023-2024 timeframe. The out-of-order Catapult would essentially be their first take on delivering a high-performance RISC-V application processor, and like we currently see with high-performance cores the Arm space, has the potential to become the most visible member of the Catapult family.

Farther out still are the company’s plans for “next generation heterogeneous compute” designs. These would be CPU designs that go beyond current heterogeneous offerings – namely, just placing CPU, GPU, and NPU blocks within a single SoC – by more deeply combining these technologies. At this point Imagination isn’t saying much more, but they are making it clear that they aren’t just going to stop with a fast CPU core.

My thoughts

So, we're apparently seeing another company dip their toes into the RISC-V ISA. This is pretty nice as someone who is an RISC-V optimist, Imagination just might be able to pull this off seeing as they're the company behind MIPS and powervr, but then again, they're the company behind MIPS. And anyway, it's unlikely that you'll be using any of the products launched today unless it's in pretty low-end stuff or in a microcontroller seeing as the ones announced today do not support out-of-order execution. So, it remains to be seen how much of an impact this company can truly make. The RISC-V optimist within me is screaming, "Oh my, this is the best thing ever, this is probably gonna be amazing" whilst the other side is like, "Welp, this is probably going to go the way of MIPS for this company". But as with many things in this year, we'll have to wait and see, and in this case the waiting may take years.

Sources

Anandtech