[1] First version of META were developed in 2001 as META-1 multithreaded DSP core aimed for audio, radio and video processing.
[2] META HTP core family was announced in 2007 and is based on META-2 architecture.
[3][4] META is designed to support between one and four independent hardware threads, which typically operate concurrently on separate tasks.
Despite the shared processing resources, each execution unit maintains a local register state, an execution pipeline, and a program counter (PC) for each thread to accommodate multiple thread contexts.
This has led to a proposal on Linux development mailing lists to remove support for the architecture from the kernel which became effective with the release of Linux 4.17 in June 2018.