Imagination reveals META family of embedded SoC processors

Indeed, the META processors are able to deliver both “hard real time” capabilities – the ability to respond to an external event in a single clock cycle including complete context switch – while also providing excellent Linux or Android applications processor platforms with fully coherent caches and MMUs. The META family stands out as a leading example of next generation SoC embedded processor architecture.

Furthermore, by the addition of features to facilitate highly efficient integration with multi-standard communications engines such as Imagination’s ENSIGMA UCC programmable Wi-Fi and demodulation engines, META delivers a new generation of processors fully optimised for the internet and broadcast connected world.

SoCs being designed today place very different demands on embedded processors than those of a few years ago, as levels of systems integration continue to rise and applications make increasing use of high level APIs and operating systems. No longer is a single processor the highest priority user of system resources - it must increasingly share bus bandwidth, memory and other system resources with other sub-system processors for multimedia, communications and other specialised functions. This means the underlying architecture of embedded processors must be updated to reflect the fundamental changes in operating environment. It is with this evolving understanding of the practical realities of embedded processing in today’s SoCs that Imagination has created the Series2 architecture for its META family of SoC processors.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “For too long chip designers have stuck to traditional concepts of CPU-based SoC design, which is increasingly not appropriate for the levels of system integration we’re now seeing in SoCs. Embedded processors – whether running applications under Linux or highly optimised DSP algorithms - now need to be much more effective in ensuring every clock cycle counts to minimise power and maximise performance, Based on our years of experience of embedding META processors in many of our SoC IP cores and customer SoC designs, as well as our work with many of the world’s most advanced SoC vendors integrating our high performance multimedia and communications engines with every major CPU architecture, we’ve built on the core strengths of our unique META processor architecture to meet the needs of SoCs far better than traditional CPUs for today’s low power, high performance connected multimedia age.”