Last week Imagination Technologies put up a set of videos of the MIPS based CI20 board in action.
Today we will be showing you a selection of these demonstrations that focus on three areas: gaming, multimedia streaming and web browsing.
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Our setup rig includes one Creator CI20 microcomputer, two Jongo S3x wireless speakers from Pure, one power meter courtesy of Hardkernel, a 1080p HDMI-equipped monitor, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a custom-designed Android robot keeping us company.
While watching the videos keep an eye on the power meter too; no matter what gets thrown at it, Creator CI20 rarely pushes more than 2.5W!
And on a related note Tom's Hardware is running a hands on review of the latest board with the stock Linux Debian and Android images, and is slightly less than impressed by the performance of the Android images, however:
When running Linux, the Creator Ci20 has decent system performance (what you'd expect from a low-end mobile chip), can play HD videos well, and supports several I/O options. It performs better, and supports more features, than the Raspberry Pi, for only a little extra cost. While it may just be powerful enough for use in a cheap computer for checking email or Facebook, its performance and price may be overkill for some maker projects.
The CI20 is a Dual Core MIPS32 board built around the Ingenic JZ4780 SoC running at 1.2GHz with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, 1GB of DDR3 RAM and various connectivity and storage connections. More detailed specifications are available, as well as a comparison against Raspberry Pi/B+ and BeagleBone black boards. Note that the original revision had 8GB of NAND Flash, but the newer version only has 4GB, which appears to be the only difference between RevA & RevB.
Imagination ran a giveaway for the RevA boards in August (and rapidly ran out), but the next batch of CI20 boards (Rev B) is stated as being available from the end of January 2015, and Imagination appears to be taking pre-orders now, with links to buy available at the Imagination site.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday December 20 2014, @07:06PM
this isnt an impressive board. the ODROID-C1 [hardkernel.com] board far more interesting because they managed to hit $35 price point to match the pi board and beat the specs of all three of those boards.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday December 20 2014, @08:05PM
how stable is this platform and its best kernel/distro combo? how long do they stay running for?
and its community support?
(I may look into this unit - and its new to me, so thanks for the ptr.)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday December 20 2014, @10:49PM
However, I had a friend who played a bit with one of these, and he was quite impressed. I nearly got one myself. Still might...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:30AM
I'd also point out the CI20 has 802.11 and bluetooth as well in addition to a BT656 camera interface levelling the cost of matching specs. Although if you want a small processor-only module the ODROID board quad-A5 looks hard to beat.
However the main thing that makes this news (IMO) is that it's a MIPS core - and it's part of the apparent attempt by imagination to bring the MIPs back up as a processor ISA competitor - it's the same reason an OpenRisc (or RiscV, or Sparc, or ...) board would be news.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 21 2014, @11:18AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 20 2014, @09:44PM
I couldn't find on the Imagination site or the SoC maker's site any information about what the ISA for the CPU is. MIPS32 has 6 revisions, although only 1 and 2 are widespread. Imagination is now pushing MIPS32r6, which is not backwards compatible with MIPS32r5 (which is backwards compatible with MIPS I, MIPS II, and MIPS32r1-r4, but not MIPS III, MIPS IV, or MIPS64r1-r6).
It looks like it's an older version, but if it's intended to get people working on MIPS-specific things then it's an odd board for Imagination to be pushing. MIPS32r6 is almost more similar to ARMv7 (unaligned accesses allowed, no branch delay slots, PC-relative addressing) than to MIPS32r1/r2.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:44AM
AIUI it's an older ISA - it quotes itself in the data sheet as being "XBurst" which from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenic_Semiconductor [wikipedia.org]
The XBurst CPU microarchitecture is based upon the MIPS32 revision 1 respectively the MIPS32 revision 2 instruction set and implements an 8-stage pipeline.
There's a data sheet and programmers manual at http://www.elinux.org/JZ4780 [elinux.org] which might have more info
It looks like it's an older version, but if it's intended to get people working on MIPS-specific things then it's an odd board for Imagination to be pushing.
My guess (and this is just a guess) is that Imagination are basically flogging MIPS as IP cores in an ARM style model, so they probably don't have any live silicon of their own outside of prototype HW, and had to pick from a handful of off the shelf solutions from SoC integrators. I'm guessing this was the best they had to get runnable MIPS systems in the field. They only bought MIPS technologies in 2013, so they're probably in the early days of the first integrations. Hopefully they can get a few more modern systems out.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:12AM
They're licensing a MIPS64r6 core now. It's a pretty nice design. Dual issue, in-order, with two threads. You can configure priorities, so either both threads issue one instruction per cycle (if they have one ready), or one thread issues two per cycle unless it's stalled (waiting for cache misses) and then the other runs. It's a design that should get pretty good power/performance at the low end.
I think they made a big mistake in concentrating on MIPS32, because (until ARMv8 came out - and silicon is still pretty rare), a mature 64-bit ISA was the big selling point for MIPS over ARM. Talking to people at Cavium, a lot of their customers who were solidly on the MIPS64 bandwagon have been asking them for ARMv8 parts because the ecosystem there looks stronger. They've made a pretty sizeable donation to the FreeBSD Foundation to fund ARMv8 work because of this.
In my day job, I work on a research-focussed MIPS III / IV implementation and the LLVM support, so I've grown to loath the MIPS ISA. It's very much a first-generation RISC. r6 is actually pretty nice in comparison, but it's very different. RISC V is far more like MIPS III than MIPS64r6.
sudo mod me up