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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 additi
by glowingly 5y ago
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.
- Namidairo 5y ago> But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new hardware releases. Yeah the MT7621 is still a popular choice at the lower-end. You'll see it bundled with a WiFi 6 radio sometimes too. You'll see the single-core MT7620 at the even lower lower end as well. > 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. The U6-LR and E8450/RT3200 use the MT7622, which is dual-core ARM Cortex-A53's. The inbuilt 2.4ghz radio is essentially still a MT7615 block doing 4x4 11n though. There's also the MT7986 ("Filogic 830"), which is essentially the same thing but with a 11ax capable radio instead. However I've only seen a couple products using it right now, with quick search reveals one only announced in the last few days too... Edit: Well not really the same thing, it's quad-core, on a smaller process and has revised offload, but you get the gist...
- minimaul 5y ago> 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 5y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE6fnmbOMD0 2:00 in, a basic block diagram is shown.
- minimaul 5y agoHuh, 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.