ENTERPRISE

Read My MIPS

12/19/2012 9:32:19 AM

Discussions about the CPU battleground usually focus on Intel and ARM, but MIPS is an exciting newcomer to the mobile CPU market.

Founded in 1984 by researchers from Stanford University, MIPS had some successful early years. Its high-speed yet low-power instruction set was used Silicon Graphics for its workstations, with the company later buying what was then known as MIPS Computer Systems Incorporated, and rebranding it as MIPS Technologies in a deal valued at $499 million. The target of the deal was the technology behind the R2000 and R3000 processors. Launched to compete with Intel’s 386 and Motorola’s 68000, the R2000 was the first readily available reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor beating ARM’s first available design by two years.

MIPS’s proAptiv design includes some neat tricks to keep data flowing

MIPS’s proAptiv design includes some neat tricks to keep data flowing

AS a RISC chip, the same benefits of ARM’s designs such as reduced transistor count compared to CISC and reduced power draw for similar performance applied to MIPS processors, making them an obvious choice for the burgeoning handheld computer market. In the early days of Windows CE palmtops, MIPS and ARM would go head to head, but only one winner emerged: ARM. When Microsoft moved from Windows CE to Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, MIPS support was dropped in favor of a dual-architecture ARM andx86 approach.

Having lost what would later be recognized as the fight to be at the forefront of the Smartphone revolution, MIPS licked its wounds and concentrated on other areas. Its high-performance, low-power architecture found enough traction in networking and high-performance computing (HPC) markets to keep the company afloat. Now MIPS is back and it intends to remind ARM that, while it may have won the battle, the war isn’t yet over.

The proAptiv IP scales up to six cores, each of which is claimed to be 50 per cent faster than an ARM Cortex-A9

The proAptiv IP scales up to six cores, each of which is claimed to be 50 per cent faster than an ARM Cortex-A9

Software support

The first hints that MIPS was looking to get back into the handheld market came in June 2009, when the company announced that Google’s Android platform had been ported to the MIP instruction set architecture. Later that year, MIPS would announce membership of the Open Handset Alliance, confirming, if there was any doubt, that it was looking at the mobile market afresh. Under new chief executive Sandeep Vij, Android-related announcements came thick fast, including the launch of the Ainol 7in ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ tablet, the first such device to retail for under $150. More recently, Karbonn Mobiles was the second company in the world to announce an Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ device, based again on a MIPS processor. As with ARM, MIPS doesn’t make chips, but sells designs to third-party manufactures. Unlike a manufacturing company such as Intel, which has to find the cash to produce enough processors to meet demand, MIPS and ARM can sit back and watch the licensing fees come flooding in – leaving their various partners holding most of the risk. It’s this risk that’s slowing the adoption of MIPS over ARM in the mobile industry, with most companies still opting for the tried-and-tested British option, but a design is coming that promises to change all that: the MIPS proAptiv core.

Mips proaptiv

Designed for the performance market, the MIPS proActiv ticks a lot of boxes: available in single, dual, quad or hex-core flavors, the processor uses a fused triple- dispatch superscalar out-of-order execution engine, and high-performance floating-point unit, all in a bundle that takes up less space than the equivalent design from ARM while boasting equivalent or greater performance.

A dial-core proAptiv design can fit 1 MB of L2 cache into the same space that an ARM’s Cortex-A15 needs for the processors alone

A dial-core proAptiv design can fit 1 MB of L2 cache into the same space that an ARM’s Cortex-A15 needs for the processors alone

Using details released at ARM Tech Con, MIPS predicts that a dual-core proAptiv chip with 1MB of L2 cache will be just over half the size of a dual-core Cortex-A15 chip, so you can pack four proAptiv cores into same space. For devices where every millimetre counts but high performance is demanded, that’s a powerful argument for a move to MIPS.

Cortex-A15 performance metrics are hard to find, but are readily available for chips based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 design and MIPS looks like an early winner. Using the CoreMark benchmark, the ProAptiv design achieves a score of 4.5 per MHz, some 50 percent hiher than the Cortex-A9 that’s at the heart of most modern smartphones and tablets. Considering that the Cortex-A9 design is the basis for high-performance processors, including Nvidia’s Tegra 3 and Samsung’s Exynos, that’s a pretty impressive figure.

Just in case you thought MIPS might just be bad-mouthing the competition, the company is quick to point out that the proApitv design leaves its own last generation products in the dust too, with a boost of around 60 per cent compared to its CoreMark per-megahertz results from the previous MIPS 1074K series.

 

MIPS claims that the proAptiv design easily bests the competition, but will OEMs be convinced?

MIPS claims that the proAptiv design easily bests the competition, but will OEMs be convinced?

Under the bonnet

These performance gains come from a wealth of improvements compared to MIPS’ earlier designs, including some clever tricks such as the use of instruction bonding to make a single memory system. There’s also an Enhanced Virtual Addressing [Eva] system for better address space utilisation, and a sophisticated branch prediction engine that promises fewer cache misses.

The floating point unit is also particularly clever. Unlike previous designs, which ran the FPU at a slower speed than the main processor, the proAptiv design runs the FPU at the same speed as the CPU. As a result, latency is reduced and the throughput improved, while the smart use of dedicated schedulers and increased parallelism means that more instructions can whizz through the system than ever before.

A second-generation coherence manager also boosts performance, boasting a design that drops latency from around 24 cycles to 11 and offers around double the system bandwidth over the previous-generation engine. There’s also a dedicated L2 cache controller within the coherency manager itself; this required a separate component in previous designs.

 The family of chips envisioned by MIPS covers a wide spectrum; mobile and tablet versions running between 1GHz and 1.5GHz will feature single, dual or quad-core designs and an integrated digital-signal processor, while set-top box versions not encumbered by battery like – will reach 2GHz.

The same architecture will also power future network devices, with single to hex-core implementations running at speeds between 1GHz and 2GHz.

The proAptiv design is joined by the interAptiv and microAptiv families, each cheaper but less powerful than the last. With the microAptiv, MIPS is even targeting traditional microcontroller markets held by the likes of Atmel and NXP the latter, funnily enough are now readily available, meaning that it’s to the company’s customers to make products based on the chips.

MIPS vs INTEL vs ARM

While Intel and ARM have been fighting, MIPS has been quietly working on the proAptiv design, and it’s now coming out of left-field. Suddenly the two giants – one holding a near-monopoly in the smartphone and tablet market, and the other holding a similar position in the desktop, laptop and server markets – are fighting a war on three fronts, and should MIPS’ claims for the benefits of proAptiv sway OEMs, both could lose serious ground in an increasingly lucrative market.

The coming fight is something of a David vs two Goliaths epic while Intel has more than 100,000memployees throughout the world, and ARM has around 2,000, MIPS is a much smaller organization of around 160. Whether that will help MIPS with increased flexibility, or hinder it with a lack of resources, in competing with two of the biggest names in the chip industry remains to be seen.

Other  
 
Most View
Microsoft Surface Pro 2 and Surface 2
Adobe Photoshop CS5 : Specialized Processes - Save For Web & Devices, Convert to CMYK, Add an Alpha Channel
Group Test: Free Office Suites (Part 2) - Zoho Docs, OxygenOffice Professional
iStopMotion 3
Top 10 Televisions – Jan 2013
GPU Cooler Quick Test: Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo 690 vs. Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro
Nintendo WII U - Modern HD Gaming Console (Part 5)
Windows Phone 8 In-Depth Review (Part 6)
Windows Vista : Recovering Systems (part 2) - Dealing with startup instability
Pin Down Your Software Procurement Plan
Top 10
SQL Server 2012 : Validating Server Configuration (part 2) - Evaluate the Policy, Using the Central Management Server
SQL Server 2012 : Validating Server Configuration (part 1) - The Need for a Policy, Create Policy on a Local Server
SQL Server 2012 : Encryption (part 2) - Certificate-Based Encryption, Transparent Data Encryption
SQL Server 2012 : Encryption (part 1) - Encryption Primer, Password-Based Encryption
SQL Server 2012 : Auditing in SQL Server (part 3) - Database Audit Specification Object, User-Defined Audit Event
SQL Server 2012 : Auditing in SQL Server (part 2) - Server Audit Specification Object
SQL Server 2012 : Auditing in SQL Server (part 1) - Auditing Objects, Server Audit Object
Sharepoint 2013 : Introducing jQuery for SharePoint developers (part 2) - Understanding jQuery methods,Understanding jQuery event handling
Sharepoint 2013 : Introducing jQuery for SharePoint developers (part 1) - Referencing jQuery, Understanding the global function, Understanding selector syntax
Sharepoint 2013 : Introducing JavaScript for SharePoint developers (part 3) - Creating custom libraries