Catapult

The RISC-V CPU

Designed for heterogeneous compute

Meet Catapult

Catapult, a RISC-V CPU product line designed from the ground up for deployment in key applications and configurable for any use. Leveraging nearly three decades of experience in delivering complex solutions, Imagination’s new CPU series is backed by the strong and ever-expanding RISC-V ecosystem.

Catapult CPUs are designed for various market applications and also next-generation control, compute and heterogeneous compute needs.

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Catapult at a glance

Catapult CPUs are available in four distinct product groups: dynamic microcontrollers, real-time embedded CPUs, high-performance application CPUs and functionally safe automotive CPUs. All Catapult CPUs are based on the open RISC-V ISA and are configurable to application needs. The first family of Catapult CPUs (microcontrollers) are already shipping in high-performance Imagination automotive GPUs.

Built on RISC-V

Design

Ground-up design based on RISC-V that can be configured for performance, efficiency, or balanced profiles, making them suitable for a wide range of markets.

Patents

Protected by a rich portfolio of hundreds of fundamental CPU patents, giving you peace of mind when you ship.

Heterogeneous

Part of the heterogeneous solution with market-leading Imagination GPU, AI and Ethernet cores.

Support

Full hardware and software support for heterogeneous SoCs using Imagination IP cores.

Functionally Safe

Accelerating automotive and industrial markets by providing functionally safe and secure CPUs.

Expertise

Established and proven over nearly three decades of expertise to deliver very complex IP and heterogeneous solutions reinforced by a strong support function.

Supported and tested

Catapult CPUs are fully optimised and tested extensively before reaching the market. In addition, Catapult CPUs are designed to be compliant with the RISC-V ISA as it develops, resulting in a solution that is fully supported by a broad and increasing ecosystem.

As part of Imagination’s heterogeneous compute solution, Catapult CPUs offer full hardware, software and debug support for SoCs using Imagination IP – including the market-leading Imagination GPU, AI and Ethernet cores. This allows SoC manufacturers to increase energy efficiency, free up system resources and improve the performance of their designs.

Highly configurable design

Catapult cores are engineered for markets ranging from 5G modems, storage, ADAS (including safety island) to autonomous vehicles, data-centre, high-performance computing. These are multi-threaded RISC-V cores which come in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants and have a plethora of configuration options. Catapult CPU solutions can be scaled up to eight coherent cores per cluster for enhanced SoC versatility with an option to add custom accelerators.

The automotive cores are systematically developed to ISO 26262 standards and provide a range of CPU solutions for different integrity levels.

The new CPUs are based on industry-proven security concepts. This design enables SoC manufacturers to attain the highest level of security and certification required by their target market.

decorative visualisation of catapult studio

Catapult SDK and Catapult Studio

Catapult CPUs are delivered with a fully-featured SDK, which includes an LLVM-based compiler and C run-time libraries, optimized by our team of compiler engineers to get the best out of our hardware. In addition to industry-standard build and debug tools such as GCC, GDB and OpenOCD, the SDK also integrates Imagination’s IDE: Catapult Studio.

Based on Visual Studio Code, Catapult Studio has been enhanced to meet the needs of embedded developers on RISC-V, with seamless launch and debug on remote targets, plus some unique data and system visualisation tools. It is available for Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, and MacOS.

Catapult CPUs are also delivered with both fast and performance models, which offer interactive debugging and are compatible with the gem5 simulator, unlocking simulation environments for enhanced power and energy-efficiency testing.

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Not all of our RISC-V products are public yet. If you want to know more we are happy to provide a deep dive into our roadmap under NDA.

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Introducing Catapult CPUs

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Webinar

This webinar will give you a sneak peek of what kind of CPUs Imagination is going to be offering in the coming years and how we are going to enrich the broad and growing RISC-V market space.

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Introducing IMG RTXM-2200

IMG RTXM-2200 is the first commercial, licensable IP from the RISC-V-based Catapult family. Drawing on Imagination’s decades of experience in CPU, it is a real-time, highly-scalable, deterministic, 32-bit embedded design that’s ideal for markets such as cellular base stations and SoC helper cores.

Find out more