[HN Gopher] MIPS provides highly scalable RISC processor IP
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MIPS provides highly scalable RISC processor IP
Author : kristianpaul
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-04-06 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mips.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mips.com)
| azinman2 wrote:
| The company is now Chinese owned, right? Would make sense they'd
| want to go for RISC-V now that MIPS itself isn't viable.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Surely the headline should be "Berkeley beats Stanford"?
| jecel wrote:
| In terms of architectural style RISC-V is more similar to MIPS
| (via DLX) than to RISC-I, II, SOAR and SPUR (and Sparc).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Hyperscalers make it easier to launch a new ISA - instead of
| convincing a lot of manufacturers that build diverse products
| with it, all of which you need to more or less manage into
| compatibility so that your software doesn't get diluted, now you
| need to convince one or two hyperscalers that your solution will
| offer the same capacity in less space for less power. That, of
| course, after some compiler enablement, but that's something
| every ISA needs to do. You can start by building a beefy server
| chip instead of a full lineup from thin laptops all the way up to
| beefy servers.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I know this is a kind of stupid little thing, but I really wish
| they'd rebranded more completely if they were going to do this.
| "That box has a MIPS processor in it. But not a MIPS processor, a
| MIPS RISC-V processor." We're going to end up with OSs list on
| their "supported platforms" page things like MIPS, MIPS64, MIPS-
| brand RISC-V.
| jogu wrote:
| To be fair this isn't an announcement of a product or anything
| like that, so their line of RISC-V processors could have
| distinct branding e.g. FooBar RISC-V Processors (by MIPS).
|
| Totally agree though that they should probably be careful and
| put some thought into how they brand these.
| dkersten wrote:
| Its not really a "stupid little thing", it sounds like a big
| cause of confusion.
| musicale wrote:
| MIPS had their chance with MIPS Open and bungled it. If they
| hadn't, then there wouldn't have been the same need for RISC-V.
|
| It's a shame because MIPS had a perfectly usable architecture
| with 64-bit support and a well supported toolchain.
|
| It's sad to see it abandoned because it was historically one of
| the first successful RISC architectures that was used in
| everything from the DECstation to the PlayStation.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I may recall wrong here, but I think MIPS is the only
| architecture in use that has one's complement integer
| arithmetics.
| MisterTea wrote:
| MIPS is making RISC-V processors? What happened to the MIPS arch
| itself?
| glowingly wrote:
| Still used in some consumer devices with older Mediatek (MTK)
| wireless SoCs and older Qualcomm (QCA) wireless SoCs. Qualcomm
| has moved onto arm uarch, in addition to largely shuttering
| their switch ASIC lineup (lots of MIPS in that product family).
| MTK seems to be moving in the arm direction as well.
|
| Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old QCA
| MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything they
| can.
|
| But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new
| hardware releases. I recently picked up a TPLink WiFi 6 AP
| because it used Mediatek wifi chips, which are well supported
| in the mainline kernel. Was a little surprised to see it still
| used a Mediatek MIPS SoC as the main glue between the various
| wireless chips.
|
| If you see a WiFi 6 AP that only has WiFi6 on 5GHz, and WiFi4/n
| on 2.4GHz, a good chance it is using a MTK MIPS WiFi 4/n SoC +
| a MTK WiFi 6 PCIe IC, with the SoC providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz
| being provided by something like the MT7915 or similar. The
| Ubiquiti U6 Lite and U6 LR are examples of this, as are the
| Belkin RT3200 / Linksys E8450.
| minimaul wrote:
| > Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old
| QCA MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything
| they can.
|
| Mikrotik don't really shove MIPS in anything new! Practically
| everything they've launched in the last few years is either
| ARM or ARM64. They seem to particularly love the
| IPQ-4018/4019 SoCs.
| glowingly wrote:
| I agree, Mikrotik have largely moved onto the IPQ4000
| series for their wireless products and their many of their
| advanced switches use the switch ASIC's onboard arm core(s)
| (CRS305, CRS309, CRS317, CRS328, etc) without an external
| management SoC.
|
| However, some of their advanced switches (CRS312 12 10GbE
| RJ45, CRS354 48 GbE 4 SFP+ 2 QSFP+, CRS504 4 QSFP28, CRS326
| variant with 24 SFP+ 2 QSFP+, etc) will often use a QCA9531
| MIPS SoC as their management chip.
|
| I was surprised to see their latest switch, the new CRS504
| (4x 100GbE) [0] used a very advanced Marvell switch chip,
| with a QCA9531 attached to it. MIPS lives!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE6fnmbOMD0 2:00 in, a
| basic block diagram is shown.
| minimaul wrote:
| Huh, I stand corrected :)
|
| I did not realise that the CRS line was using MIPS so
| much still! The CRS switches I have handy are all using
| the integrated dual ARM cores.
|
| edit: I assume those switch chip variants don't have
| integrated ARM cores, and the older Qualcomm MIPS SoCs
| are presumably ridiculously cheap.
| my123 wrote:
| Slowly dithered away...
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Yep. Amazing when you consider that Windows CE ran on MIPS
| hardware (NEC VR3xxx and VR4xxx chips). Casio's Cassiopeia
| series for example.
|
| It's not quite a "what could have been" because they were
| really eclipsed by the StrongARM at that point, as I recall,
| but it's very notable how quickly people lost interest in
| MIPS.
| my123 wrote:
| It lived on for quite a while with a strong position in the
| networking market later on.
|
| But then instead of focusing on networking/infrastructure
| hardware like they could have, they went on a wild goose
| chase... to try to gain a place in phones.
| glowingly wrote:
| To be fair, Power PC was also trying an extended post-AIM
| life in networking. I don't know if the big-endianess of
| some networking stacks had anything to do with it.
|
| The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip
| onboard. One could even see it from the Windows Device
| manager as such :D
|
| I see NXP has largely slowed development of their old
| Freescale PPC lineup (formerly Motorola's PPC and logic
| division) in favor of arm chips.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip
| onboard.
|
| In my collection I have an IBM server that has two
| Pentium II processors and, IIRC, three PowerPCs handling
| specialized chores such as the network and disk array.
|
| The Telum processor is only part of the story of their
| new mainframe too. While it's the Telum that runs the
| application code, there are many other different
| processors (and some Telums with different microcode
| loaded on boot) performing specialized jobs. The machine
| can have up to 256 Telum cores, but there's a maximum of
| 200 that can be dedicated to user code. The remaining
| cores will be working to ensure the user code doesn't
| need to wait for anything.
| gnulinux wrote:
| MIPS is pretty similar to RISC-V, but RISC-V is a lot more
| mature by now. Seems like a reasonable business decision.
| masklinn wrote:
| How can riscv be "more mature" when mips was used in
| commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years ago?
|
| The PS, PS2 and PSP ran on mips. So did the N64. Multiple
| top500 super-computers were mips. There were mips
| workstations and servers.
|
| _mips went to pluto_ , the new horizon probe ran on mips.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > How can riscv be "more mature" when mips was used in
| commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years
| ago?
|
| one thing i can think of is risc-v has done away with
| branch-delay slots... does modern mips isa still have
| those?
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's not what mature means. Mature is that all edge
| cases have been explored, all kinds of random numerical
| computations have been expressed, tool chains & debuggers
| exists in many forms and are well supported, the chips
| have scaled from dish washers to RAD hardened satellites,
| etc etc
| [deleted]
| panick21_ wrote:
| What happened is that SGI dropped it and then it got passed
| around like between one company after another while it
| consistently lost more and more market share to ARM.
|
| Until MIPS was mostly irrelevant as an arch.
|
| So eventually the company realized that trying to only build on
| MIPS was not gone work, so they Open-Sourced MIPS itself and
| they are trying to use their knowledge to be part of the RISC-V
| ecosystem.
|
| But since they were late to that game as well, I am skeptical.
| monocasa wrote:
| > they Open-Sourced MIPS itself
|
| Well, they didn't even do that, they just made a big
| announcement that they were opening up which as far as I
| could tell just meant they put a link to their sales staff on
| a web page rather than making you look them up.
| CalChris wrote:
| The title really should say RISC-V rather than RISC. MIPS already
| is a RISC, one of the first.
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