Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Imagination announces single board MIPS computer for IoT – Creator Ci40
It follows on from the Creator Ci20, which is Raspberry Pi like in that it can work with a keyboard mouse and display, running Linux or Android, plus it has network radios on-board.
While Ci20 used a dual-core 1.2GHz MIPS32-based JZ4780 a processor from Ingenic, the Ci40 is to have a chip with dual MIPS interAptiv cores made by Globalfoundries on a 40nm low-power process – see diagram. Wi-Fi is through Imagination’s Ensigma C4500 radio baseband core.
“Whereas other boards for IoT tend to re-use chips made for mobile or networking devices, we have created a custom IoT subsystem that has been tuned for IoT requirements and connectivity standards. For example, the chip has built-in wireless capabilities, supporting both 802.11 ac 2×2 Wi-Fi but also low energy Bluetooth [Bluetooth Smart],” said Imagination, which owns the MIPS brand.
Both cores are have hardware dual-threading.
Very little further information is available this week. Imagination is to drip-feed further details from this Ci40 web page. The unfilled entry for the 27th October has a penguin logo, which might predict the operating system.
‘IoT processors’ appear to be falling into two camps:
- Very low power designs for battery or harvested power sensor nodes – frequently with wireless ability.
- Processors for bridges, routers and data concentrators – a camp which would have been filed under general purpose MCUs until IoT branding became de rigueur.
The Imagination/GloFo core looks a little between the two: it has Bluetooth Smart – suited to battery-power, but also Wi-Fi which makes it look more like a processor for mains-powered bridges and routers. Electronics Weekly awaits further announcements with interest.
