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There's definitely more activity outside the labs than inside, however there are still a few Bell Labs people who work on it. For example, the new MIPS kernel w
by 4ad 13y ago
There's definitely more activity outside the labs than inside, however there are still a few Bell Labs people who work on it. For example, the new MIPS kernel was entirely labs work.
- rbanffy 13y agoMIPS? Who's using MIPS these days? Retrogeeks excepted, of course.
- 4ad 13y agoMost routers are MIPS. There are probably more MIPS devices coming out each year than ARM devices, it's just that they are in very small devices and now in fancy phones.
- vidarh 13y agoLast I saw, the estimated number of units shipped for ARM was around 3 billion, with MIPS and PPC at around 500 million, and x86 somewhere in the 300m-400m range. EDIT: These are per year for all of them.
- 4ad 13y agoYou might be right, I might be wrong. We'll never know. I tried to find good numbers, but estimates seem to be made up; e.g. between 1 and 10 billion ARM CPUs each year. I couldn't find good data. Either way, even if MIPS doesn't dominate anymore, it's still a huge market (probably more chips than x86), and will continue to be in the future (even though it might be shrinking).
- vidarh 13y agoNetworking equipment, various set-top boxes (the WDTV Live is a good example, running on a tri-core Sigma MIPS CPU; two cores are user accessible, the third is locked down to run DRM crap), some Android devices. Bunch of other embedded uses. As I noted elsewhere, at least as of a year or two ago MIPS was likely still outselling x86 in terms of volume (but x86 is still supreme in terms of revenue because all the other architectures have far lower average unit costs). They're having a hard time keeping up, though.
- rbanffy 13y agoYes, but what use would be a Plan 9 kernel for them? Is anyone actually using Plan 9 on a commercial product?
- 4ad 13y agoWhat is the point of anything? What is the point of life. There is no point, the point is that people have fun working on things they tickle their intellect. People are motivated by things that are hard, beautiful. People are motivated by things that haven't been done before. People are not motivated by the usefulness of a thing. Plan 9 is a research operating system, it's a platform to do fundamental operating system research. It is not a product, and its development is not shaped by commercial interest. That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9.
- rbanffy 13y ago> Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9. Wow! That's insanely cool!
- jff 13y ago> That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. Some of it. Some of it runs Solaris. http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage
- lotsofmangos 13y ago"Plan 9 shows up in lots of different types of applications, making use of different benefits. It is used in embedded systems, where the low overhead is important. It is used in commercial products where the reliability and performance are important. It's used in massive supercomputers where the novel interconnections and low "system noise" are needed. What you get out of it largely depends on what you're looking for from it." http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/faq/index.html#ABOUT_PLAN_9 http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/faq/index.html#ABOUT_P...