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Imagination Tech Announces MIPS-based 'Warrior P-Class' CPU Core
MojoKid writes "Imagination Technologies has announced the first CPU based on its new version of the MIPS architecture. The new P5600 chip (codenamed Warrior) is a 32-bit CPU based on the MIPS Series 5 architecture and is designed to challenge companies like ARM in the embedded and mobile markets. Major features of the new chip include: support for 40-bit memory extensions, or up to 1TB of RAM, a 128-bit SIMD engine (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), and Hardware virtualization (MIPS R5 can virtualize other machines in hardware). The P5600 core is being touted as supporting up to six cores in a cache-coherent link, most likely similar to ARM's CCI-400. According to IT, the chip is capable of executing 3.5 DMIPs/MHz in CoreMark, which theoretically puts the P5600 on par with the Cortex-A15."
It depends what you are doing. I don't think anyone is making servers or desktops out of this, and even with recent forays into 64bit ARM (Apple's A7 for example) 32 bit is far from dead. That being said MIPS64 has been around for quite a while, so I don't think it will be a problem to adapt to it at some point in the future.
What do you know I wrote a novel
COMPETITION IS GOOD.
I'd love to see MIPS make a comeback. I've been looking for one of the looongson (?) netbooks for awhile now, just so I can have a MIPS Linux box to play with, but those seem hard to come by.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
In either case, the main stumbling block to 'openness' (from the perspective of people who don't have the cash to implement a core and get it fabbed, or even buy a run of a pre-cooked design, and don't want to enjoy the pleasures and efficiencies of implementing their CPU in an FPGA) isn't really the CPU ISA; but the fact that the SoCs you can actually buy tend to be coupled with GPUs that make Nvidia look like a model of transparency and AMD a model of driver-writing competence.
If memory serves, the rPi's SoC depends on a fairly massive binary blob driver and a 'VideoCore 4' GPU thing that is right up to Broadcom's usual standards for openness in documentation, which is presumably what the grandparent poster doesn't like.
Most of the punchier ARM options aren't a whole lot better (though some of them are somewhat less weird). Certainly, given that Imagination Technologies is already a supplier of GPU architectures to ARM licencees (and occasionally Intel), I'd assume that any MIPS SoCs you end up being able to buy will be approximately as bad as the ARM scene, maybe a bit worse.
Now, if you do want to bake your own CPU, MIPS64 is probably a better option (though don't they still have a few patented instructions? I vaguely remember some flap concerning the legal status of that Chinese MIPS-and-national-pride CPU a few years back...)