Imagination announces single board MIPS computer for IoT

Today Imagination Technologies is announcing that it's working on a new member of its single-board computer Creator family, to be called Creator Ci40 and designed for IoT applications.

By Steve Bush - Electronics Weekly, Oct. 20, 2015 – 

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 2x2 Wi-Fi but also low energy Bluetooth [Bluetooth Smart]," said Imagination, which owns the MIPS brand.

Both cores are have hardware dual-threading.

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