The MIPS platform got a big boost last week with a series of announcements. First, Imperas is releasing the Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) Fast Processor Models for the MIPS Warrior P-class and M-class CPU IP cores from Imagination Technologies. Example virtual platforms are also being released, as well as support for the cores in the Imperas M*SDK advanced software development tools. Also, the Imperas M*SDK and M*DEV products support the Imagination Codescape Debugger for embedded software debug and development.

The P5600 and M51xx processor cores, as well as models of other MIPS processors, work with the Imperas and OVP simulators, including the QuantumLeap parallel simulation accelerator. All OVP processor models are instruction accurate, and very fast, focused on enabling embedded software developers to have a development environment available early to accelerate the entire product development cycle. Virtual platforms using these processor models can be created with the OVP peripheral and platform models, or the processor models can be integrated into SystemC/TLM-2.0 based virtual platforms using the native TLM-2.0 interface available with all OVP processor models.

The second announcement comes from a collaboration between Green Hills Software and Imagination Technologies (IMG.L). Going forward, the Green Hills tools and compilers will support an expanded range of Imagination’s MIPS CPU IP. This includes fully optimized support for the microMIPS code compression instruction set architecture and for the MIPS Warrior M-class and I-class CPUs.

Later this year, Green Hills will add support for Imagination’s 64-bit MIPS I6400 cores. These products will likely find homes in markets such as storage, networking, digital entertainment, and consumer electronics. Green Hills’ support of the MIPS architecture includes its C/C++ compiler, assembler, and linker, binary toolchain, MULTI integrated development environment (IDE), probe, and SuperTrace Probe.