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I will be the dissenting voice and say I prefer MIPS. Like the Wintel (Windows/Intel) monoculture, ARM brings the GoogleArm monoculture. The Apple/Arm monocult
by 1996 6y ago
I will be the dissenting voice and say I prefer MIPS.
Like the Wintel (Windows/Intel) monoculture, ARM brings the GoogleArm monoculture. The Apple/Arm monoculture that some people seem to hope for would be no different: heavily restricted, with fewer possibilities for free software.
MIPS64 offer us a good royaltie-free alternative, to be independent of the western companies (UK/US based)
If Nvidia gets ARM, I fully expect the same shenanigans Intel pulled on X86.
So I hope a third party alternative (MIPS, Sparc, anything) will be there, hopefully with a major fab like Samsung behind it.
- sigjuice 6y agoMIPS64 is no longer royalty-free. Wave Computing Closes Its MIPS Open Initiative with Immediate Effect, Zero Warning https://www.hackster.io/news/wave-computing-closes-its-mips-open-initiative-with-immediate-effect-zero-warning-e88b0df9acd0 https://www.hackster.io/news/wave-computing-closes-its-mips-...
- iagovar 6y agoSo we're only left with RISCV? Sparc seams a dead end, and power too.
- floatboth 6y agoIBM is actively investing in POWER though
- aww_dang 6y agoWould be nice if they brought that back into the laptop realm.
- erk__ 6y agoThere is a project to make a power pc laptop https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ Though it does not use a IBM CPU.
- duskwuff 6y agoThey claim to be using a NXP T2080 CPU as the core of their laptop. This is doomed to failure. The T2080 is a high-speed communications processor. It is not designed for energy efficiency. It can draw up to 20W at full power, and does not support the sorts of power-saving features that would be required for a mobile part. The datasheet doesn't even specify the processor's idle power consumption! Some of the tables can be read to imply that it might be able to idle down to roughly 7W, but that's still completely unsuitable for a laptop.
- sigjuice 6y agoAre there other Power processors that might be better suited for a laptop?
- duskwuff 6y agoSomewhat not by much. NXP has a couple of other QorIQ parts which might fit a laptop application a little better; for instance, the T1040 series (4 cores, 1.5 GHz, 7W TDP) seems like a better fit. IBM's POWER parts are aimed squarely at supercomputing and are completely unsuitable for this use case. But, quite frankly, none of these parts are really intended for mobile use. There hasn't been any real interest in mobile Power hardware since Apple got out of the business nearly 15 years ago -- ARM cores have utterly dominated that market.
- classichasclass 6y agoPower ISA isn't dead. Besides IBM's server offerings, you can buy workstations with a POWER9 retail right now. POWER10 is in the works and it's a royalty-free ISA. That's in addition to all the little embedded cores that are still around.
- mobilio 6y agoMIPS future is unclear: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/22/is-mips-dead-lawsuit-bankruptcy-maintainers-leaving-and-more/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/22/is-mips-dead-lawsuit...
- non-entity 6y agoWhere is MIPS used these days? I've only seen one MIPS device in the wild (a DOCSIS modem using some domain-specific Broadcom MCU) but I've heard about it plenty over the years.
- HeckFeck 6y agoRouters mostly. I think some set-top-boxes and DVRs also used it. Shame, it had quite the history from being in all those old SGI machines.