Imagination Technologies, a name notorious amongst Linux users largely over the company's shoddy Linux driver support for their PowerVR graphics cores, unveiled a new processor core today. Announced today in London was Imagination's first MIPS "Warrior P-Class" CPU core.

Back in 2012 Imagination took over part of MIPS and now nearly one year later they're out with the first MIPS Series-5 Warrior P-class CPU. The company calls this new processor a "major step forward" for high-performance MIPS CPU IP cores. The new 32-bit processor is low-power and has a silicon size up to 30% smaller than other comparable CPU cores. This is the first processor built on the MIPS Release 5 ISA, which was announced in December of last year. SIMD, hardware virtualization, and enhanced virtual addressing are among the key features to the MIPS architectural upgrade.

The new 32-bit MIPS P5600 CPU core has 128-bit SIMD support, hardware virtualization capabilities, next-generation security, and up to six cores per cluster. Imagination also said today they will be expanding their MIPS Warrior CPU family over the next year with more 32-bit and 64-bit variants.

More details on the new Imagination MIPS Warrior can be found via the ImgTec press release.