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MIPS Tempts Hackers With Raspbery Pi-like Dev Board
DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "In a bid to harness the energy and enthusiasm swirling around today's open, hackable single board computers, Imagination Technologies, licensor of the MIPS ISA, has unveiled the Creator C120 development board, the ISA's counter to ARM's popular Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black SBCs. The MIPS dev board is based on a 1.2GHz dual-core MIPS32 system-on-chip and has 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, and there's also an SD card slot for expansion. Ports include video, audio, Ethernet, both WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, and a bunch more. OS images are already available for Debian 7, Gentoo, Yocto, and Arch Linux, and Android v4.4 is expected to be available soon. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the board is that there's no pricing listed yet, because the company is starting out by giving the boards away free to developers who submit the most interesting projects."
I imagine this'll turn up in CS courses that use Patterson and Hennessey's Computer Organization and Design textbook, which uses the MIPS ISA as the canonical example.
The entire appeal of the raspberry pi was that it cost only $35. This new thing, you won't even tell us the price. If you need to ask, you can't afford it...
Why would anyone want to waste time on a project for this board without even knowing what the board eventually is going to cost ?
Price is an important factor in evaluating the platforms chance for success and developers do not want to develop for a platform that is doomed a priori because it is simply to expensive.
Because I don't care what it costs YOU to develop the project, I care what it costs me...
Ok, that's an over simplification. The board looks pretty sweet and would be an excellent choice for a project I'm working on. I expect that Imagination Technologies is trying to gauge demand, which will affect the price point of the final board / production. I've submitted an entry, however due to timing and their site problems (it initially crashed because of the load) it was a pretty short paragraph or two and I doubt my project will be selected. But I'm looking at other contenders rather than my initial plan of the Rpi because it has various short comings (of which, this board seems to sidestep quite nicely).
On the projects I work on at least, the cost of the MCU hardware is almost irrelevent. In fact in most commercial projects involving microcontrollers or embedded systems, the cost of development boards is not that important. If you're rolling out a large volume of devices you're almost certainly going to be using a custom board anyway. Aside from all this, I can't imagine the cost of the board will be far out of line with similar products; as it'll need to compete when it's released for sale.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The site mentions a power supply so what's the power envelope ?
Why would anyone want to waste time on a project for this board
You wouldn't waste time on a project for this board as the specs for it seem to be entirely generic. So your project would work just as well on many of the other SBCs out there. There don't seem to be any killer features on this product (possibly the camera) so whatever you were planning to create for a Cubie, or an Olimex or any of the others would work on this one, too. And if it didn't then just toss this variant and continue working on the more mature SBCs
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Another important factor is having a reliable source for your components (grumble)
I can see this small board stuff getting as fragmented as the bazillions of Linux distributions available. Choosing which board you want to play with will get as complicated as choosing a phone plan. Too much choice is not good. What the right amount of choice is, I don't know.
Slashdot's been running awfully heavy on marketing promotional material, lately, with things that aren't even available yet. This one doesn't even have a price? I thought I checked the "ads disabled" checkbox.
You expected a different graphics solution from Imagination Technologies?
This mips board is dual-core 32-bit. Other manufacturers have shipped mini-pc form factor boards with: -Intel octacore 64-bit, -ARM octa-core 32-bit, -ARM quad-core 32-bit, -ARM dual-core 64-bit.
It's very interesting to have another alternative, but MIPS manufacturers will have play catch up in terms of core-count, price and GNU/Linux open-source support with respect to the kernel and the graphics chipset aspect in order to turn some heads and have people fork out cash for them. I'm still conservative. In my humble-opinon dual-core ARM or MIPS running at ~ 1GHz doesn't compare well-enough with >3GHz dual-core Intel product in terms of GUI responsiveness. Battery life isn't the only concern and never will be. INTEL/AMD rock my world on the desktop, but ARM QUAD-CORE is adequate and I'll admit that. I have no problems recommending QUAD-CORE anything, provided they have 4-8 GB RAM, SATA, USB 3.0, and Gigabit Ethernet. Anything else will frustrate users or users will end up wanting for more a couple of days after the purchase. I'm not talking mobile devices here. I'm talking wanna-be hybrid tv-box/mini-PC as desktop replacements. Why are we still selling 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM devices? I'll tell you why: MANUFACTURERS want to dump their legacy product before they ship the newer gen stuff. I won't sell that stuff because nobody wants that or will be frustrated with that stuff. Is it just me or do the manufacturers have a "TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT" attitude towards the consumers. Didn't dual/quad core-32bit exist 15 years ago? Something doesn't smell right in this picture. Shouldn't we be octa-core 64-bit on the desktop/mobile already?
Linux support for MIPS is actually pretty good, and has been around at least as long as ARM support if not longer... The rest of the toolchain, like gcc etc also has good MIPS support. There is already 64bit MIPS support in the Linux kernel and has been for a long time too, MIPS is actually one of the oldest 64bit architectures out there.
MIPS would actually be better off focusing on this, as they have a good head start on ARM when it comes to 64bit and multiprocessing. I used to have a 24 cpu (discrete cpus, not cores) 64bit MIPS years ago in the form of an SGI Onyx.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Wake me up when there is pricing, and I'll decide how interested I am. I'm not interested in a product which could cost $INFINITY dollars.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Aside from all this, I can't imagine the cost of the board will be far out of line with similar products;
Depending on how you write the definition, "similar products" can cost anywhere from about $35 on up to about $500.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> Why are we still selling 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM devices?
Microchip still sells the PIC10F200, with 16 bytes of RAM. SoCs exist in every imaginable configuration from there on up to chips which are comparable to a low-end PC, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The top-end will continue to grow, but the bottom-end and middle won't disappear.
For a "device" which is supposed to run a specific program, with no ability to install additional software, you can determine an upper bound on the resources the system actually needs, so there's no point in paying for any more than that.
MIPS32r6 [...] added things like [...] the requirement that hardware supports unaligned loads and stores (or, at least, that the OS traps and emulates them)
What kind of patent does Imagination Technologies have on features essential to MIPS32r6? And how is it licensed, compared to (say) ARM? If you'll recall, unaligned loads and stores were one of the few things about the original MIPS ISA that were patented.
Right, because obviously with a board like this someone is going to try and create a Call of Duty clone rather than say some sort of controller system.
Or not.
Consider that without a price, a person doesn't even have the OPTION of buying one...
And of course, price *IS* important in the real world... most people don't pay more money for something if they do not genuinely believe that it carries a value that is worth the amount of time and energy that it took to earn that amount of money. That's all very well and good if you have infinite amounts of cash, but most of us do not, and have to do menial things like budget. That involves knowing what your expenses are likely to be, and what kind of time frame it would take to pay for things that you do get.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There appears to be enough RAM and enough compute power, but the Ethernet interface is pathetic. Even in an inexpensive experimenters' board, GBit Ethernet should be standard. For one thing, it's hard to judge the real processing power needed (as a fraction of the available) for networking, when the network, itself, is the bottleneck.
GUI responsiveness is more a matter of software bloat than about hardware.
A Commodore 64 at 1 MHz running GEOS can sometimes be more responsive than a PC with dual eight-core Haswell Xeons.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
So what ?
Many ARMs are sold as unicore 50MHz Cortex 3 for example. Not every application needs 16 cores at 2+GHz, for more than one reason.
And 64 bits is more of an ograde on x86 than other machines especially if one doesn't have more than 3GiB of RAM.
Which product(s) have the same specs as a RPi and cost $500?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Which product(s) have the same specs as a RPi and cost $500?
If you haven't seen ARM dev boards with lower specs than a RPi which cost that much, then you haven't actually priced them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You expected a different graphics solution from Imagination Technologies?
At least they could have provided drivers if they want Linux developers using it. Just shipping an unsupported GPU that doesn't even have decent binary drivers is kind of pointless.
Certainly longer, at least by a few years.
We're selling them because there is demand for them.
Also, this device clearly is not targeted to be a desktop replacement.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
What makes you think they aren't providing drivers?
Mada mada dane.
Iirc, MIPS32 ISA is wholly compatible with MIPS64 ISA, the latter being a proper superset of the former.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I would imagine that the reason price hasn't been announced yet is because they don't know just how much they will ultimately be able to make them for themselves, and the giveaway they are doing is to gauge demand so they can figure out how much they have to charge.
If that's the case, the more ideas that got submitted to them, the better it will be.
Of course, it also might mean that giving them a preview into what kind of demand to expect, they might know for sure just how much they will able to fleece future customers. So hey... what do I know?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What makes you think they aren't providing drivers?
That they are providing their normal drivers which are no good. They either need to make better drivers (which I don't think they can), or they need to help the production of open source drivers which this could have been a good move to do, but as it is, they just going the NVidia route without the manpower, quality or anything.
When we had SPARC, MIPS, POWER (w/ all its internal variants - PowerPC/POWER/Power), Motorola's 88K, Intel's i860, Intergraph's Clipper and then DEC went on to add the Alpha to the list, that was too many choices. Instead of a gazillion Linuxes, you had a gazillion Unixes - one for each CPU, such as SunOS, AIX, DG/UX, CLIX, and more for some specific CPUs, such as SCO, Unixware (then separate), Interactive Unix, Dynix for the x86 and Irix/Ultrix/RiscOS for the MIPS II, such a situation was not good. It was tough to standardize any software targeting all these platforms. So initially, Sun, and later Linux, won out. A fewer ISAs would have been better
But all of the above diminishing or going away hasn't been good either - we have a duopoly of just x64 and ARM. I'd like to see MIPS, SPARC and Power return, the latter 2 not b'cos of IBM or Oracle, but rather smaller vendors taking the initiative and creating boards of this. On the software end, I'd like to see not just the various Linuxes, but also Minix, the BSDs and even Windows RT get ported to such platforms, so that people can choose what they want to build.