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First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing
New submitter alexvoica writes: Today Fedora contributor Michal Toman has announced that the first Fedora 22 image for 32-bit MIPS CPUs is available for testing; this version of the operating system was developed using our Creator CI20 microcomputer, which includes a 1.2 GHz dual-core MIPS processor. In addition, Michal announced he is working on a 64-bit version designed to run on MIPS-based Cavium OCTEON III processors.
Great question (I get asked about this a lot). Here are a few points:
(1) Hardware multi-threading support: MIPS offers SMT support for the latest Warrior CPUs; for a slight increase in area (~10%), you can scale up the number of hardware threads (1, 2, 4) and get a 40-50% boost in performance. ARM CPUs do not support SMT and can only scale in number of cores.
(2) Better hardware virtualization support: MIPS Warrior CPUs support hardware virtualization at the low end (e.g. microcontrollers) as well as the high end (application processors). ARM CPUs support hardware virtualization only at the high end. Moreover, MIPS CPUs support multiple trusted execution environments (up to 7 in MCUs, up to 31 at the high end) while ARM CPUs have only one TEE.
(3) Better raw DSP performance: MIPS Warrior CPUs offer superior DSP performance vs. equivalent ARM CPUs (e.g. up to 2.5x better DSP performance in MCUs)
(4) Better performance efficiency: MIPS CPUs offer equivalent performance but at smaller area/power consumption over equivalent ARM cores (e.g. up to 30% area savings at the cluster level and 40% savings at the core level relative to similar performance competition)
(5) More mature 64-bit ecosystem in networking and embedded: MIPS 64-bit CPUs have a rich history in high-performance enterprise networking (examples include Broadcom XLP and Cavium OCTEON processors); there is a whole ecosystem formed around OpenWrt on MIPS for example.