Imagination To Release Open MIPS Design To Academia

DeviceGuru writes: Imagination Technologies has developed a Linux-ready academic version of its 32-bit MIPS architecture MicroAptiv processor design, and is giving it away free to universities for use in computer research and education. As the MIPSfpga name suggests, the production-quality RTL (register transfer level) design abstraction is intended to run on industry standard FPGAs. Although MIPSfpga is available as a fully visible RTL design, MIPSfpga is not fully open source, according to the announcement from Robert Owen, Manager of Imagination's University Programme. Academic users can use and modify MIPSfpga as they wish, but cannot build it into silicon. "If you modify it, you must talk to us first if you wish to patent the changes," writes Owen.

Comments

Re:Talk to us first if you wish to patent the chan

[Bruce Perens]

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

OpenRISC

[unixisc]

There is an alternative if one wants to avoid the strings Imagination has attached to the MIPS HDL sources. It's called OpenRISC, and it's from OpenCORES. It's based on the MIPS architecture, but has work-arounds around patented MIPS sections. Go w/ that if you want a fab to fab it out

Re:OpenRISC

[Bruce Perens]

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.

definition of 'open'

[lkcl]

Microsoft has an "Open License" which allows you to look at Windows NT source code. it's "open", yes? pay them $USD 1m per year, you get an "open" look at the source code of Windows NT. but if you ever dare to use it, talk about it, or do ANYTHING other than *read* it.... they will sue the fuck out of you.

bottom line: can we PLEASE stop using the word "open" in context with these types of stupid, stupid proprietary arrangements? it really isn't helping.

there are plenty of *LIBRE* licensed implementations of MIPS out there: many people have pointed that out (in comments i can see above this one), they're on http://opencores.org/ - there are at least eight MIPS core implementations that i can see, there, possibly the best one (most complete) is this: http://opencores.org/project,m... which has a 5-stage pipeline and a harvard architecture.

so please, stop using the word "open" to refer to proprietary, restricted and patented material.

Re:OpenRISC

[TheRaven64]

It's not clear what version of the MIPS ISA they're implementing (the article I read just said MIPS32, which covers a whole range of things). It sounds like it's MIPS32r6, which is not backwards compatible with any previous MIPS version. The only value of MIPS over something like RISC V (which is increasingly the standard ISA for computer architecture research) is that there's a large body of existing software for it, so you can do real evaluation.

We've done a clean-room reimplementation of MIPS III (R4K compatible) implementation in BlueSpec, which is a high-level HDL. MIPS III and the R4K are over 20 years old, so any architecture-specific patents will have expired. In comparison, this core is only 32-bit (really not interesting for research) and is written in a low-level HDL (making the kind of invasive changes that you want to do in research difficult), and is an ISA that has very little software support.