This morning Imagination announced their MIPS I-class 64-bit CPU family. These are the first IP cores to combine a 64-bit architecture and hardware virtualization with scalable performance through multi-threading, multi-core and multi-cluster coherent processing.

MIPS has unveiled a new edition of its processor architecture, the "release 5" which inherits the "release 3". With the new architecture, MIPS hopes to improve their standing in the competition with ARM, and the most important features include hardware-assisted virtualization, and new SIMD instructions. There is also improved support for multi-threaded execution, and the address space for 32-bit architecture has also been upgraded.