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Hope for MIPS, From Toshiba
CDWert writes: "EE Times is reporting MIPS is teaming up with Toshiba, to develop their next generation 64 bit proccesor. After all the Itanium Speak and X86-64 talk going on here and the premature predictions of MIPS demise, through their inability to fund the next round I thought this would be refresing to MIPS fans." According to the article though, there will be no product until at least a year from now.
I don't know about others, but as for Microsoft, they're working on MIPS compilers.
What I found especially interesting was the range of devices that MIPS chips are used in. It occurred to me that very few people probably need a 2GHz P4 in their inkjet printers and mobile phones.
Only if we can keep measuring it in FLOPS and sounding silly when talking about it. "Yeah, this new MIPS chip runs in the tera-flops."
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
It'll be interesting to see how it compares to the SiByte SB1, which a MIPS64 instruction set SOC with two cores.
Timothy, why are you such an idiot?
They announce a new CPU and all you can say is that it won't arrive this year? no shit sherlock. These things take just a little time and effort (and money) to produce.
Well I never thought Id get an article posted, submitted 7 and never one got accepted, ANYWAY as a result, I didnt complete my story, Just figuring what the hell and let the slashdot editors take it and run with it.
One of the coolest parts, I thought it will be a 0.10 micron process, is anyone else using this small of a process yet ?
Is there hope for SGI and MIPS or has SGI decided against it in total ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Read the first two paragraphs of the story. Toshiba is taking MIPS' Amethyst core and developing an embedded controller around it, to be known as TX99. With 600MHz clock, scalable to 1GHz, this is great news for the embedded world and will position MIPS as a competitor to Motorolla for embedded h/w. But it isn't really a new chip for MIPS, just a variation on an existing one.
Also, the purchasers of commodity embedded processors tend to be slow to change, so MIPS/Toshiba will have to make a compelling case to do so.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
MIPS is a great technology.
It will revolutionalize the embedded sector quite a bit.
For anyone interested in learning more about MIPS and Linux (there is a port, BTW)... Check out this HOWTO link
The small footprint of MIPS chips makes Linux/MIPS suitable for many embedded systems.
If we're getting by pretty well on 32-bit chips, where's the market for 64-bit chips? High speed routers?
-cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
I'm a little confused. My understanding was that the x86 processors were CISC, while the MIPS proecessors were RISC. However, IA64 was a grand departure from x86, both because the instructions were 64bit, because they were almost all predicated making branch prediction hell a thing of the past, and most importantly, unlike the x86 CISC design the IA64 would be a RISC chip. What would a 64bit MIPS chip offer that the IA64 does not? Why do we need another 64bit RISC processor?
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
ARM's stuff has gained massive ground in the mobile devices and virtually squeezed MIPS (and everyone else) out of that market entirely. The trouble is that MIPS are being squeezed on the upper end of the scale as well by some seriously grunty main CPUs which are starting to adopte the same sort of friendliness to bespoke licensing for incorporation into VLSIs. Such as IBM's PowerPC chips. By way of an example, Sony aren't going with MIPS for the PS3, they're teaming up with IBM.
So where is left for MIPS? Sounds like they're going after SoT type applications which are in need of serious performance, niche that they are. Make something all singing, all dancing with a damn nippy core in there and you hit applications which ARM haven't got the performance for and PPC type chips don't have the power considerations and SoT/integration levels for. Good luck to them.
Considering the clock ranges from 600 to 1000 MHz, how low power requirements they have compared to sux86, and how nice laptops Toshiba makes (at least they used to), I hate to see this technology limited to 'embedded' devices only. Does someone seriously need a faster laptop?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
To anyone who's coded in Assembly, MIPS is pure beauty.
The entire ISA is minimized so as to accomplish most operations in the fewest clock ticks (duh -- it's RISC). But after dealing with the crappy x86 design, it is so refreshing to deal with a logical and straightforward architecture such as MIPS. No messing with ES or DS pointers, just simple, general purpose registers. And don't get me started on the "extended" register size kludge in x86 (EAX -- what the hell?). MIPS doesn't have such baggage.
I've coded for SPARCs, I coded for Motorola's 68k and 68HC processors. But nothing beats MIPS in terms of power from simplicity.
Itanium will finally get a 64-bit competitor?
</sarcasm>
Seriously, the way some people write about the Itanium, you would think nobody had every created a 64-bits processor before.
Toshiba spun off ArTile Microsystems for the TX7901 mips cpu with a 128-bit internal architecture, dual-issue superscalar pipeline CPU, but it has taken years.
http://www.artilemicro.com/html/products.html
Don't expect to see a TX99 till at least 04 at this rate and by then it will be behind the times just like the TX79.
.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
SGI did look into the Intel chips for the long term. But after the delays with the newer Intel chips and a relook at the Intel vs. Mips issue, they have decided to continue with the Mips line for a while. I know they had some plans to make the Origin 3000 available with Intel chips, but I don't know if this has been done. I think they are better off with the proven track record of the Mips processor and how much they have invested in knowing Mips.
But that's not the important part. The important stuff is that the cost of production is the same for a 64 or 32 bits processor (research costs sunk, like in this case). So, argument is why use a larger, less powerfull chip if they can use a better, smaller chip.
Also, legacy compatibility is less important in embedded devices than any other market i can think of (and specially consumer PCs).
unfinished: (adj.)
In addition, the MIPS Alliance Program (MAP) supports the availability of critical hardware and software such as 802.11, Bluetooth, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, audio algorithms, ATM, and others.
Well I think they got all the buzz-word technologies. If they didn't the "and others" should cover it.
I Heart Sorting Networks
This is just speculation, but I think ARM is putting a lot of pressure on MIPS in the embedded market. The ARM is almost as much of a pleasure to work with as MIPS at the assembly level, and it uses very little power. This is why Intel's StrongARM version of the ARM has found its way into many PDA's and other portable devices.
-John
MIPS based hardware was expensive, so they sold limited quantities (relative to other CPUs). Or they other way arround which is the same (ie: they couldn't mass market it like and intel or AMD chip, so they had to charge accordingly).
But now, they will be in embedded devices. So the chip is the same but mostly everyone will be able to take advantage of it's power for a few bucks. I don't know exactly what devices, but they can be cameras, video recorders, pims, portable mp3 player, miniPCs, smart reconfigurable routers, etc.
Onliner: same design, but affordable for the masses (this is my guess)
unfinished: (adj.)
According to the article though, there will be no product until at least a year from now.
So, about 5 years before Itanium actually ships, then?
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
on an earlier article, i predicted the demise of MIPS and similar architectures due to the increasingly prohibitive cost of chip design, and the increasing standardization around intel and intel clusters.
i didn't consider partnerships, if two or more merely giant corporations share the load of development, then there can still be competition for the truly titanic.
anyway, best of luck to them, and here's hoping there will always be a choice.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Larger Routers, Core switches, Stateful inspection firewalls, NetBSD powered toasters, Tickle-me Elmo and whatever else you don't have the vision for.
> So, please tell me where does one need 1 GHz embedded processors?
Embedded systems are getting quite fancy nowadays; it was claimed in "Embedded Systems Programming," January 2002, that cell phones have 10^6 lines of C or C++. They need the horsepower.
For example, it might be more cost-effective to implement signal processing in a fast microcontroller, than to have a DSP chip and a general-purpose microcontroller.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I love reading the comments that say things like, "MIPS will revolutionize the embedded market!" and "Maybe there's hope for SGI yet!"
MIPS microprocessors are everywhere, and have been for years and years. They're in your TV, your cell phone, your microwave oven. They're in those cool little GPS receivers that everybody wants for Christmas. They're in the PlayStation 2, Replay TV PVRs, and most of Cisco's routers.
Look around your office. There are probably half a dozen MIPS processors within about twenty feet of you right now.
This is nothing new or revolutionary, and it has nothing to do with the MIPS R10K, R12K, and R14K processors that SGI uses in their computers. Everybody calm down.
Although Linux is ostensibly a competitor to Windows, it has made most of its inroads in the "big iron" market.
Most of the non-Intel processors are in this market (HP-RISC, SPARC, MIPS)-so what we are seeing is Linux, in effect, killing these other processors. High-end production houses are leaving their SGIs for custom build x86 boxes, servers are dropping Sun and IBM for x86 offerings from Dell and Compaq.
As Sun slowly fades into the night (no pun intended) the only non-x86 CPU with any installed base in the high-performance market anymore is the PowerPC, and its fate is closely tied to the shaky Apple, which is struggling to re-invent itself with OS X.
God bless Toshiba! I wonder if Sony would add some R&D into that pot in preparation for the PS3, and maybe we would have another high-performance chip to compete with Intel.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
A piece of news that not many people have noticed recently is that MIPS have settled with Lexra.
Lexra is a company producing MIPS compatible chips without a MIPS licence. Lexra have been revealing holes in the MIPS patents in the ongoing court case. As Lexra have been succeeding a little too well and MIPS have simply given up and in order to stop Lexra from revealing that the MIPS 32 architecture is not patent able they have given them a MIPS32 licence.
Unfortunately MIPS still have a couple invalid patents to press on people who try to make compatible processors.
This is quite annoying personally as I have recently released a MIPS compatible processor (Yellow Star) and have now received letters from MIPS complaining about everything on the web page and threatening legal action even though I haven't broken their invalid patents.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I believe that SGI's flirtation with the Intel chip really put them down for a while. They were even releasing SGI machines with NT installed. Why would anyone want to buy an expensive NT machine when a PC could handle the workload?
I really like IRIX and think that it is a good OS. If they want to save money, then make the switch to Linux. I think that the MIPS chip is going to be around for a while, in handheld devices and others, but there processor for servers/workstations is quite powerful as well.
They use MIPS and are struggling with CPU speed compared to Intel. The current 600 Mhz core is in the new Fuel workstation. Be nice to see the 1Ghz version even nicer to get a new generation.
R20K maybe?
Blogging because I can...
It's like Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA, may or not have said: You have to get there "fustest with the mostest."
My university teaches assembly programing using MIPS (mainly using the SPIM simulator on our department HPUX machines). I hope the company survives and prospers. I would hate to graduate with an obsolete skill. Does anyone know how common MIPS is in the CS/CoE/EE academic areas? Does the adoption of an standard in academia help it gain market share?
AUGAUUUGCGCACAUAUCUCAGCGAAUGAAAGGGAUUAA
So, if they don't improve anything, they will beat Itanium to market and outperform it.
The ISA may be nice, but as anyone that has debugged real code will attest its not meant to be human readable. The problem comes from the MIPS idea of having the next instruction execute no matter what (with the exception of a few instructions which flush the pipeline). The result is that after a branch you execute the instruction immediately after it, then you execute the instruction at the branch. Apply this repeatedly, and you'll see the problem...ugh.
As countless others have pointed out, a modified core aimed at the embedded market isn't very newsworthy (at least not to people who only care about the "computer" (PC/laptop/workstation/server) market, which Hammer and Itanium target). Brings up an interesting question though: Many architectures have started primarily targeted at the "computer" market, failed to meet expectations there, and were retargeted at the embedded market, sometimes with great success. Will an embedded processor ever make the reverse transtion, into the "computer" market?
Why is that fortunate? If I pay for something, it's nice to actually own it and be able to do what I want with it. Instead, the guy who happened to own it first gets preferential treatment? In the US, when a company founder sells the majority of his shares, he usually becomes an employee of the company, since everyone else has put in more money than he has. Even if he's done a great job and put his blood and sweat into the company, that'll be reflected in the price everyone else has to pay. Why should he be treated specially?
We recently took an SGI Octane 2 (current SGI state-of-the-art) and an IBM Intellistation with a FireGL3 card for a test drive. The SGI Octane 2 was a 400MHz MIPS R14000 chip, and the IBM a P6 @ 1.7 GHz.
The Intellistation is approximately a third the cost of an Octane 2. It also outperformed it by a factor of 2.5. It outperformed our older Octanes (R12000 @ 300MHz) by a factor of 3.5. Not just CPU (renderman & vmantra) but also interactive OpenGL. Same factor across the boards.
Unless MIPS can pull a serious rabbit out of their ass, they're far, far, far behind INTEL, no matter how you slice it.
In this kind of products it seems nice to have all those 64 bits, even in integers. Anyway, just an idea - there are devices out there beyond routers that are part of an embedded market and may benefit from these extra bits.
I was using 64-bit IRIX eight years ago. Painful the first couple of years. Since it takes MicroSoft 10-15 years to catch up to a new processor size, I don't expect to their pain soon.
Good grief.
NetBSD is one of the most solid and stable Free Software projects out there.
It's so stable that it's almost boring.
Except it's so damned interesting that they can fit all those architectures into a single tight source tree.
As embedded processors become are and will be increasingly used in everything from cell phones to washing machines, the intel monopoly will begin to decline. Even presently, the TI DSPs
http://www.ti.com
are the market standard, and there is no reason why MIPS can't carve out a huge niche for themselves.
Awww, it's not that bad. If the compiler can't schedule an extra instruction in there, it just puts a nop in, and once you get the idea of how it works it's not so hard to mentally swap the instructions. Course it did throw me for a loop when I was coming from x86 asm. "How the f*ck is it doing *that*?"
Granted, it's a performance hack (and since I'm merely a software weenie, I'm not even sure it's useful in the age of speculative execution) but I believe a couple of other RISC architectures share this particular, uh, "feature".
Not to be too offtopic, but a few people have been saying mips is dying. I'd disagree... the ps2 uses a Mips III clocked at 300 megahertz amoung its handful of processors. I think mips has a good thing going with sony, and should keep some money in the bank. I mean TI does the same thing with sun and they're staying afloat.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
MIPS has BEEN in embedded applications for a long
time. I was using an IDT 3051 (R3000) core in
an X-window terminal 10 years ago. They have
been in laser printers, CISCO networking boxes,
video games, X terminals and other high-end
embedded gear for a while...
-- All that's left of me, is slight insanity, whats on the right, I don't know. -- Bob Mould
did SGI used to own MIPS? at least that's the impression i get when i look at the board of directors and there past (sgi, sgi, sgi, sgi... oh sorry sgi)
Coding in MIPS Assembler
Written by Emmanuel Schanzer
To the tune of: Living La Vida Loca, by Ricky Martin
Her code is so efficient
Her programs never crawl
She's on a debugging mission
That girl's code is off the wall
(guitar solo)
This is her occupation:
Make code run fast and light
She brings a strange affliction:
Coding into the night!
She'll make you code, then re-fine.
Mem'ry dancing brings you pain
She'll change reg-ister 29
Her tricks are so insane!
Like crack-rock in the brain!
Shift right then shift back
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll push and pop the stack
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll branch if greater than
Increment the program counter
Load im-med-i-ate
She's coding in MIPS assembler
Coding in MIPS assembler
Woke up and went to my class
smelling funky and like hell.
Debugged till 6am, its not funny
She's like a process that you can't kill.
She don't believe in easy
Never comments any code
And when you trace a register
Can't tell from where it loads
Not enough addressing modes!
Shift right then shift back
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll push and pop the stack
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll branch if greater than
Increment the program counter
Load im-med-i-ate
She's coding in MIPS assembler
Coding in MIPS assembler
(guitar solo)
But you will learn to love her:
Take abuse and not complain.
Store registers defensively,
Debugging code for fame,
All high-level stuff is lame!
Shift right then shift back
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll push and pop the stack
She's coding in MIPS assembler
She'll branch if greater than
Increment the program counter
Load im-med-i-ate
She's coding in MIPS assembler
Coding in MIPS assembler
Coding in MIPS assembler
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.