MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives

Will Imagination actually publish specs so that Linux is able to implement anything without reverse engineering? The history of binary blobs on PowerVR is not encouraging.

MIPS hasn&#x27;t gone anywhere. You can get PIC32 chips and boards based on them for various projects include the Open Source TenTec 506 Rebel radio.<p>While there&#x27;s more tools and chips for ARM on small systems, I still prefer MIPS due to lower complexity&#x2F;insanity of the tool chain.<p>It&#x27;s hard to get any of the large system boards and multiprocessor chips without being an OEM.

Strange. He talked about that fact that MIPS has been lacking compatibility for Java apps on Android...but completely disregarded the fact that Android L will compile apps natively on MIPS, just like on ARM.

I think it is an interesting strategy, creating what is essentially an alternative to ARM&#x2F;Mali as a single license SKU. There are rumors floating around that this chip is in a soon to be unveiled Chromebook. I take those with a large grain of salt since every hardware vendor seems to say &quot;This is in the next gen (Google&#x2F;Apple) device!&quot;<p>Would love to see additional competition here, but Imagination has not been very forthcoming in the past on specs, so maybe Surface material rather than Android&#x2F;Linux material.

Amusing headline considering MIPS chips (R4000 etc) were the first 64-bit CPUs outside supercomputers in the early 90s.

<p><pre><code> Imagination’s executives have also stated they are prepared to offer aggressive IP bundling discounts </code></pre> My mind boggles at attempting to enumerate the number of issues implicit in that simple statement.

From the article: &quot;Keep in mind that these processors use different instruction sets (ISAs) so DMIPS are not directly comparable.&quot;<p>But DMIPS doesn&#x27;t refer to million instructions per second, but to the relative performance for a standard benchmark relative to a VAX 11&#x2F;780 (which is considered to run at 1 MIPS). So any differences in instruction sets are already accounted for.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhrystone" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dhrystone</a>

&gt; When Imagination Technologies acquired MIPS Technologies in 2012 for $100 million<p>Pretty depressing that a pioneering company like MIPS was sold for such a relatively small sum.

What&#x27;s kind of neat is that you can put a downright <i>silly</i> amount of MIPS cores on something. Octeon, for example, with like 48 cores:<p><a href="http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON_MIPS64.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cavium.com&#x2F;OCTEON_MIPS64.html</a>