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MIPS Technologies Porting Android 4.1 to MIPS Architecture
angry tapir writes with news on Android getting support for a third architecture. From the article: "ARM rival MIPS is continuing its push to make a mark in low-cost tablets and quickly trying to bring Android 4.1 (Jellybean) to its processors. 'We are working aggressively on bringing Jelly Bean to MIPS, and expect that it will be available to our licensees very soon,' said Jen Bernier-Santarini, director of corporation communications at MIPS, in an email. Tablets with MIPS processors are largely low-cost and have found buyers mostly in developing countries. MIPS last week said a new tablet called Miumiu W1 from Chinese company Ramos would become available in a few months in India, Latin America and Europe. The tablet has a 7-inch screen, a MIPS processor running at 1GHz, front camera and a microSD slot for expandable storage."
Good, finally ARM manufacturers will stop having a monopoly where they can charge whatever they want. I've seen hints at OEM chip prices and they're ridiculous compared to even desktop chips. That will help everyone...just in time for x86 tablets to come out so people can actually run whatever they want.
By the way, if you're wondering as I did but were too lazy to look it up, yes, they actually named themselves MIPS without noticing that that's also Millions of Instructions Per Second, a method for measuring the speed of any CPU. Theirs stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages and it refers to an instruction set. What an unfortunate oversight. Stages could have been replaced with just about any other word to differentiate it.
Great. Now we'll see the same fragmentation Windows CE had all those years. Most games use the NDK and contain binary compiled specifically for ARM. Obviously those apps will not run on the MIPS processor. Microsoft eventually learned this was not a good thing and finally forced all OEMs to use ARM to qualify for Pocket PC branding.
Now all we need is Android running on SH3 and we'll have gone full circle.
Better known as 318230.
It's not x86 so it's not safe from mandatory M$ restricted boot.
But how many BogoMips does that proccessor have?? >.>
Forgive my ignorance; but when and how did MIPS get relegated to second-class status? I still see them crop up from time to time, certain cheapy router SoCs still come out with MIPS cores; but ARM appears to have gone rampaging across much of the territory that Intel hasn't already entrenched themselves in.
Was there a fuckup or an epic design win at some point in the past?
I remember when Windows ran on MIPS!
.. And we'll be back in the bad-old wince days! Man, I don't miss that platform at all.
Mips sure has been a waning platform. SGI's gone, and with it their high-end. Arm has been eating them up in the mobile space for decades, and as a halo effect it's been replacing mips in the embedded fields too.
There is, however, a lot of renewed interest coming from china. Their home-grown chips are mips based and they're churning out more, faster, higher core count packages every couple of months. (In fact I bet this is the basis for most of the interest in mips-andriod.) I bet we'll be seeing those seep in to market. Heck, nvidia just lost a bunch of GPGPU customers in china because they refused to develop mips linux drivers.
Good luck trying to match ARM's mimd, simd, thumb, jazelle, every instruction supporting conditionals, and the support for foreign ISA's.
Very early on, back in the 1990s, ARM and MIPS differentiated themselves by ARM going after phones and MIPS going after computer appliances in their desperate quest for revenue. Thus MIPS being in the PS1, N64, PS2 and current routers. This turned into a massive win for ARM in the aftermath of the iPhone, when smartphones became the breakaway non-x86 personal computing platform. Now MIPS is trying to get in on the party.
Originally, again back in the 1990s, MIPS had better support under Windows CE, and thus was primed for the market segment ARM currently rules, that of "handheld personal computers." Of course those devices weren't also phones, so them were niche devices. And Apple, in choosing ARM for the iPhone over PortalPlayer (iPods) and MIPS, not only was looking at their phone expertise, but Apple also had helped float ARM back in 1990, and still owned an interest in the company.
Luck of the draw.
Finally I'm one set closer to getting apps on my smart tv box.
Seems like MIPS has been used in budget super computers lately in China. Nice that they are early out with porting this. Someone should make a cheap unbranded, unthemed, vanilla. android phone.
Is this the year of the Linux tablet? Is this the year of the Linux smartphone? Was that last year? Wooot!
Just sayin....
By the way, if you're wondering as I did but were too lazy to look it up, yes, they actually named themselves MIPS without noticing that that's also Millions of Instructions Per Second, a method for measuring the speed of any CPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun
I hope this catches on in chinese market place. For those who aren't on the up and up of what are considered "cheap chinese knockoffs." They actually have some great products, usually in the Portable Music Player market (which Ainol and Ramos usually do), everything plays OGG, FLAC, MVK, in hardware (yes I know the difference between a container and an encoding scheme bare with me...), they often advertise 1440p ( while this standard isn't out so you can watch it in that, it does mean 1080p doesn't lag), have HDMI outs, USB-OTG, and other stuff that is not amazing and you can get this for like 50-100 bucks. Though the down sides are horrible battery life(good batteries are expensive), and low long term storage memory; 16 gigs max, but expandable.
Prepare to get a port for the PSP.
Companies making complex chips don't like releasing specs to all and sundry
The problem comes when the maker of a component doesn't release specs even to companies integrating the component into a (lower-volume) product.