Imagination takes on Raspberry Pi with Android educational computer

To encourage take up of the boar,d called MIPS Creator CI20, the company is giving away the first batch of these boards for free to application developers. All the developers must do is submit an interesting project on the Imagination website.

“We have several universities already lined up to receive a few hundreds of these boards,” said Imagination.

This is Imagination’s bid to widen the use of MIPS CPUs in the Linux and Android developer space, and break into the low cost computer board market dominated by ARM-based processors.

The (90.2×95.3mm) board has a MIPS-based Ingenic Xburst processor clocked at 1.2GHz, which is 170% faster than the CPU inside the Raspberry Pi, accroding to Imagination.

More importantly the board runs Android and a PowerVR SGX GPU can run Android games and apps which have already been optimized to run on this graphics processor.

The Ingenic XBurst architecture features both SIMD and FPU instruction sets; the FPU supports both single and double floating point, IEEE 754 compatible formats.

On-board dedicated video processors can support high-speed (up to 1080p at 60 fps), low power playback for a lot of popular video formats (H.264, VP8, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 etc.).

Interfaces include Ethernet, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth 4.0, along with two USB ports and GPIO, SPI, I2C, IrDA and JTAG.

An HDMI connector is included for connection to a monitor screen and the board comes with an external 5V power supply.

There is some more on MIPS Creator C120 on the Engineer in Wonderland blog.