6 ms·
Interesting but complementary foray into owning the end-to-end pipeline of chip design, fabrication, and packaging - especially for embedded use cases. MIPS ha
by alephnerd 1y ago
Interesting but complementary foray into owning the end-to-end pipeline of chip design, fabrication, and packaging - especially for embedded use cases.
MIPS has also hitched it's horse to RISC-V now, and I am seeing a critical mass of talent and capital forming in that space.
- kragen 1y agoThe critical mass of talent and capital forming in the RISC-V space happened in 02019 at Alibaba: https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/07/27/alibaba-unveils-xuantie-910-16-core-risc-v-processor/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/07/27/alibaba-unveils-xuan... AFAIK MIPS still hasn't shipped a high-end processor competitive with the XuanTie 910 that article is about. And I think the billions of RISC-V microcontroller cores that have shipped already (10 billion as of 02022 according to https://wccftech.com/x86-arm-rival-risc-v-architecture-ships-10-billion-cores/ https://wccftech.com/x86-arm-rival-risc-v-architecture-ships...) are also mostly not from MIPS.
- garblegarble 1y agooff-topic but: I've noticed you prefix years with a zero in your HN comments. First I thought it was just a typo, but I see you've made several comments like that. Is there some significance, or are you just raising awareness of the year 9999 problem?
- rrakow 1y agoI think that's some "Long Now Foundation" meme.
- dcminter 1y agoThat. Personally I think it's performative nonsense, but you have to admire the commitment to it.
- MalbertKerman 1y ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 1y agoI suspect it’s counterproductive, though, like deliberately not using pronouns and always referring to someone by name. The intent might be to draw attention to the author’s cause, but it’s more likely to come across that the author just writes weirdly.
- dcminter 1y agoEh, I also think it's harmless, and lends a certain "brand" to their posts - which are usually quite good otherwise. Better to be weird than dull, right?
- kstrauser 1y agoI guess, unless the offputting:goodness ratio gets lopsided and makes people start ignoring them. Frankly, something about that leading 0 makes me grit my teeth and stop reading. I can't explain why it affects me like that. Perhaps I'm the only one who does, although threads like this seem to pop up whenever they post so I don't think so. If HN had a mute button, I'd probably use it just because it annoys me to that level. Edit: And now that we're talking about it, they seem to have the need to mention a specific year way more than most, as though deliberately looking for opportunities to draw attention to themselves. Oof. That just made it about 10x more grating to me.
- acdha 1y agoIt’s the Long Now Foundation’s convention - a bit cultish but harmless. https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 1y ago(BTW why do you write years with a leafing zero? Do you expect these post to still matter past year 9999?)
- dcminter 1y ago...and if he does, why does he then consider the year 99999 to be out of reach? As I understand it the idea is to promote "long term thinking" but I really don't see how this affectation is actually supposed to achieve anything beyond mildly irritating/confusing the reader. At least the Long Now Foundation stuff comes with that context built-in. https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
- ndiddy 1y agoGood point, I will start the Longer Now foundation and start adding two zeroes to the front of all my years.
- hypercube33 1y agoThis whole line of conversation and use of the leading zero reminds me of The Church of MOO from the old internet.
- dcminter 1y agoHuh, I know about Bob Dobson et al, but MOO-ism somehow escaped my notice back in the day. http://textfiles.com/occult/MOOISM/ http://textfiles.com/occult/MOOISM/ I have some retro-reading to do.
- hulitu 1y ago> AFAIK MIPS still hasn't shipped a high-end processor competitive with the XuanTie 910 that article is about The last high end MIPS was in the SGI times, 30 years ago.
- kragen 1y agoYes, but their claims over the last few years have been that their RISC-V implementations will be super fast, not like all those pikers, because they're using MIPS microarchitectural techniques. And so far I haven't seen them ship anything that substantiates that.
- chasil 1y agoLoongson was making them until recently. https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/loongson_inspur_cloudos/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/loongson_inspur_cloud...
- kragen 1y agoYes, but MIPS wasn't.
- Findecanor 1y agoIt was some time ago that MIPS did announce that they had competitive RISC-V cores and had signed customers for them: LG and in the automotive sector. I'd think those should be taped out by now, but who knows... I think the C910 looks better on paper than it performs in practice. I hope that isn't the case for MIPS.
- kragen 1y agoDo you have any details?
- Findecanor 1y agoI can only refer to MIPS' own press releases, unfortunately. They mention 4-wide OoO, RV64GH + Zbb + Zba. no V. That is a frustrating pattern in the RISC-V world. Many companies that boast having x wide cores with y SPECint numbers but nothing that has been independently verified.
- kragen 1y agoNo V sounds like a bad sign for performance. Do they have any part numbers?
- monocasa 1y agoAdding to what was said, it also suspiciously looks like a MIPS core with a RISC-V frontend strapped to it sort of like Qualcomm did with their Nuvia AArch64 core. Particularly stuff like the soft fill TLB from m-mode looks just like MIPS coprocessor 0.
- ajb 1y agoThere's nothing especially wrong with using an existing backend design and transitioning it to another ISA; a number of teams did that from mips->arm and had success with the result. Of course, if you ship too early you may be missing some features.
- ajb 1y agoIt's an interesting comparison because MIPS used to occupy the niche that RV does now - an ISA that anyone could implement. Lots of companies had their own mips implementation, but still might use an implementation from mips-the-company because even if you have your own team, you probably don't want to implement every core size that you might need. But then for some reason lots of them switched to using ARM, within a few years (in some cases getting an architecture licence and keeping their CPU team). It seems like RV has a more stable structure, as the foundation doesn't licence cores, so even if one or two of the implementors die it won't necessarily reflect on the viability of the ecosystem
- bobmcnamara 1y ago> an ISA that anyone could implement. You want to burn your initial capital on lawyers? This is MIPS we're talking about.