MIPS Wants To Challenge ARM in Phones, Tablets

[Guest]

As Intel is more aggressively moving its processor architecture down-market, ARM could be facing another competitor who is moving up-market.

MIPS Wants To Challenge ARM in Phones, Tablets : Read more

 

[Guest]

"director competitor"?

More direct competitor, you mean?

 

[aznshinobi]

Good, I hope MIPS does well. ARM needs some competition from someone other than Intel as well. Their CEO doesn't seem to get yet that Intel can catch up fast.

 

[boiler1990]

I'm excited. It's good to see start-ups, especially in this field.

 

[agnickolov]

[citation][nom]boiler1990[/nom]I'm excited. It's good to see start-ups, especially in this field.[/citation]
You should probably read the article more carefully before commenting. MIPS is a 27 year old company, not a startup. Back in the Win NT4 days Microsoft even supported it as one of the many Windows platforms...

 

[jdog2pt0]

I'm looking forward to this as well. Competition on the same level, across different technologies can only lead to more innovation.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]agnickolov[/nom]You should probably read the article more carefully before commenting. MIPS is a 27 year old company, not a startup. Back in the Win NT4 days Microsoft even supported it as one of the many Windows platforms...[/citation]

To be fair, they don't have a preexisting presence in modern smart phone and tablet CPUs.

 

[digiex]

China's "homegrown" microprocessors use MIPS architecture.

I still remember the RISC, CISC competition way back then, CISC (INTEL) triumph, Motorola's RISC did not survive... Because of MS/Intel collaboration.

RISC made a comeback courtesy of ARM.

 

[zeratul600]

damn a 150 company can make processors??? awesome!!!

 

[ashinms]

Whatever happened to AMD and Google dukin it out over MIPS? I thought they were in talks to be told again...

 

[ashinms]

[citation][nom]zeratul600[/nom]damn a 150 company can make processors??? awesome!!![/citation]

There have actually individuals who have built their own simplistic 8bit 2Khz processors out of copper wires and magnetic transistors and then programmed them in their own assembly language. Just Google big mess of wires. I can't remember the second one, but a different guy actally has his own instruction set that he builds processors for other people and hosts his website from one such machine.... Surprising part is they're both married and appear to be pretty normal people

 

[ashinms]

Edit: Second is called homebrew and does not use his own ISA.

 

[Guest]

Surely MIPS are about a decade too late for this game?

 

[Guest]

MIPS CPU's have always been excellent, I'm so glad they are even trying to compete. If there was a MIPS smartphone, I'd buy it over a crappy ARM design any-day! I miss MIPS / SGI!!!

digiex :
"I still remember the RISC, CISC competition way back then, CISC (INTEL) triumph, Motorola's RISC did not survive... Because of MS/Intel collaboration.

RISC made a comeback courtesy of ARM."

You have no idea what you are talking about... 1. RISC never lost, in fact, Intel CPU's from the Pentium-Pro onward do NOT directly execute x86 instructions. The CPU's translate the x86 ops into micro ops (RISC) and then execute those. If anything, Intel saw the future and quickly realized the future was RISC, and not CISC.

2. IBM's POWER CPU's, which power the worlds most powerful supercomputers, are leaps and bounds ahead of Intel CPU's. If Apple would have switched to IBM's POWER CPU's from POWERPC CPU's, there would have been little to no transition time and Macintosh's would be 10 fold more powerful than today's Intel power x86 Mac's.

3. Sun Sparc (oracle Sparc now) is another industry leading RISC design that has been around since the early 80's, and is still going strong.

I find it hard to believe that someone could be so ill-informed... it just boggles my mind.

 

[lathe26]

Wow, I completely forgot that MIPS existed. I had even written some assembly for MIPS for a compilers course back around 1997. I haven't heard the word MIPS since around 2002.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]digiex[/nom]China's "homegrown" microprocessors use MIPS architecture.I still remember the RISC, CISC competition way back then, CISC (INTEL) triumph, Motorola's RISC did not survive... Because of MS/Intel collaboration.RISC made a comeback courtesy of ARM.[/citation]

Like JustPosting3 said, RISC is used in pretty much everything. Most modern x86 CPU architectures from Intel and AMD execute complex x86 instructions as several simpler RISC micro-operations and there is a large RISC presence in the server server environment. A lot of gaming consoles also use RISC CPUs. ARM also isn't the only company making low-end RISC processors.

AMD's GCN GPUs also use RISC, if I remember correctly.