The recently Anandless AnandTech is reporting that Imagination Technologies/MIPS has ARM in their crosshairs.
Based on the 64-bit MIPS64 instruction set (release 6), the Warrior I6400 core is the middle-class CPU core in a family of three, each targeting a different point in the power/performance curve. Imagination is releasing the I6400 core last, which is at the middle of the pack balancing performance with power. Imagination has already released their high-end P56xx series and low-end M51xx series.
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Intel's Knights-branded Xeon Phi chips remain the most familiar "many-core" accelerators or coprocessors. However, another name has emerged recently: PEZY, whose 1,024-core chips were used in the top 3 most efficient supercomputers. Tom's Hardware reports that PEZY's next generation of chips will boost the core count to 4,096 and integrate Imagination's 64-bit MIPS Warrior CPU onto a system-on-a-chip:
PEZY Computing, a Japanese firm that makes the top three most efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the Green500 list, announced that it will integrate Imagination's highly efficient 64-bit I6400 CPUs into its many-core architecture.
The PEZY SC-2 will be PEZY's next-generation system, which will increase the 1024 core count of the first generation PEZY SC to 4096 cores, or four times more. PEZY's many-core accelerator has been combined with Intel CPUs from top supercomputers to significantly increase their efficiency for computing tasks. For instance, the Shoubo supercomputer, which uses Haswell XEON CPUs and PEZY SC many-core accelerators, was able to break the world record with 7 GFLOPS/W performance.
In the November edition of Green500, the top 23 supercomputers used a heterogeneous architecture with many-core accelerators. In the updated June edition of this year, that number increased by 40 percent, and now the top 32 supercomputers are using many-core accelerators. These supercomputers all use accelerators from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and PEZY. The current top 3 supercomputers are manufactured by PEZY Computing and Exascaler Inc, and include Haswell or Ivy Bridge Xeons as well as PEZY many-core accelerators.
Presumably the integration of the MIPS CPU could allow relatively power-hungry Intel Xeons to be ditched entirely.
Previously: MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives
Wave Computing Adopts Low Power MIPS 64-bit Multi-Threaded Core
Wave Computing [...] announced today that it has selected a 64-bit Multi-Threaded processor core from MIPS Technologies for future AI solutions. Wave will use the MIPS core in its next generation of Dataflow Processing Unit (DPU) chips that will ship in Wave's future deep learning systems to handle device control functions including management of the real-time operating system (RTOS) and system-on-chip (SoC) subsystem.
As design complexity and software footprints continue to increase, the 64-bit MIPS architecture is being used in an even broader set of datacenter, connected consumer devices, networking products, and emerging AI applications. In addition to Wave, companies including Mobileye, Fungible, ThinCI, and DENSO, among others, are using the MIPS 64-bit processor core as they develop ground-breaking AI applications. [...] Last August, Denso group company NSITEXE, Inc. announced that it licensed the newest MIPS CPU to drive enhanced in-vehicle electronic processing.
Related: MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives
PEZY's Next Many-Core Chip Will Include a MIPS 64-Bit CPU
ARM Cortex-A35, Snapdragon 820, and New Imagination MIPS Processors
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched
Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
(Score: 2, Informative) by tonyPick on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:08AM
Awesome news.
Imagination are doing some fairly cool stuff with newer MIPS cores, and importantly they're looking at bringing good Linux support fairly seriously as well; I was sent a link to this job vacancy [imgtec.com] the other week.
Imagination/MIPS are forming a Fedora team to work alongside the existing MIPS open source communities. The task is to take MIPS through to being a primary architecture in the Fedora/RHEL space, enabling further enterprise scale deployment of the MIPS architecture.
It looks like they're putting together some nifty development boards as well, so they're covering a wide range of products; there's a bunch of development boards [imgtec.com] available, and something like the C120 [imgtec.com] looks to be aiming at the Beagleboard/SBC level hackers.
I've always liked working with MIPS cores; they're an attractively simple architecture, although some of the implementations and particularly the many "slightly custom" extensions have often been less good. Be interesting to see where Imagination go with them.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 04 2014, @12:49PM
This part has me excited: Full hardware virtualization including IOMMU. I'll take a small dev board with a dual or quad core 1.5 GHz+, 1GB+ ram with at least one PCIe x1 port and some type of easily accessible external memory bus.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:37AM
Good to see some progress. We certainly need a viable alternative to ARM, and MIPS has fallen behind because they've been totally rudderless for a few years, due to corporate woes. At one time, MIPS was far more successful than ARM, and are still widely used in high-end embedded devices like routers (home WiFi and the Cisco/Juniper types), printers, etc., etc. It's a funny quirk of fate that the low-power low-end specialist processor got a monopoly on high-end smartphones and tablets, where MIPS was always more capable and better suited. But being dead to the world for a few years can really have technology pass you by.
While ARM is trying to prove that they can scale-up to supercomputers while still scaling down to battery-power-sipping embedded devices, MIPS has done so for many years, both popular in embedded devices, and in SGI's huge Irix systems that render Dinosaurs and whatnot.
As an added bonus, China has thrown its support behind the MIPS architecture. That R&D and flood of low-price chips gave us the first $99 Android 4.x tablet, the first $150 NetBook (eg. Skytone Alpha-400), and more, and could really help propel the architecture.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Thursday September 04 2014, @01:27PM
(Score: 1) by novak on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:08AM
I'm excited to see this. MIPS is a solid architecture and it's nice to see them getting back in the game a little bit. More choice is a good thing, and it also looks like these guys are helping build an open source community with the prpl foundation. Good job guys.
novak
(Score: 1) by zafiro17 on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:38AM
I'm glad to hear this too - haven't heard much about MIPS recently with the exception of the occasional Chinese press release - didn't they release a laptop called Longsoon or something that was based on the MIPS chip, and Richard Stallman uses one because he considers them more free/open that most stuff produced in the Western World? (If so, what delicious irony!)
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 04 2014, @12:46PM
The netbook you are thinking of is the Lemote Yeeloong. RMS liked it because all software inside of it was free, even the BIOS/firmware.
(Score: 1) by novak on Thursday September 04 2014, @03:48PM
Yep, in fact Loonson is the chip manufacturer and if I recall they are still putting out new machines, including a recent mini-ITX offering with 6 cores:
http://trisquel.info/en/forum/2014-news-about-mips-loongson-hardware [trisquel.info]
novak
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:09PM
sudo mod me up