
Can MIPS Leapfrog RISC-V? - Cieplak
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334317
======
nickik
I don't think it will. This is clearly a totally reactionary move of a company
that has been absolutely trounced in the commercial market by ARM and saw the
writing on the wall that once RISC-V established itself the few gaps they
lived in would be eventually replaced.

This, 'throw it over the wall' style open sourcing has worked before, Docker
being an example.

The problem is their current 'open' strategy is probably not open and dynamic
enough to compete with RISC-V. And the consumers that don't care still don't
have much reason to use it over ARM.

Maybe they can find a gap but I don't think they have a long term growth
curve.

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tntn
Genuine question related to riscv: what is the value of a standard when a
majority of it is part of optional extensions? Doesn't that make riscv a ton
of distinct standards, marketed as one?

RV32I is nothing close to RV64IMAFDQCPBS. It seems like all the fragmentation
standards are made to avoid packaged up as a "standard" to make sure
everything under the sun can use risc-v.

(see also usb-c)

~~~
TomVDB
Many of the optional extensions are either trivial to implement (think
multiplier/divider) with minimal logic or are almost considered standard by
now (e.g. compressed, because code size is critical for embedded CPUs)

For now, the vast majority of RV CPUs will go into embedded CPUs, where an
extension is a compile switch away.

In practice, I think all embedded CPUs will be RV32IMAC.

For bigger CPUs, it's pretty simply: almost all them will be RV64GC.

ISA fragmentation is nothing new: x86 and ARM don't seem to have a problem
with them, and one could easily argue that those are way more fragmented than
RV right now.

~~~
snvzz
>RV32IMAC

Or RV32IMAC+some extension that makes sense for the application.

There's also a non-defined but planned RV32E for embedded.

>RV64GC

I suspect this will be the case at first, then a superset will take over.

e.g. bitfield operations extension and vector extension are unlikely not to be
taken advantage of by e.g. Debian. Likely resulting in a few arch variants
with increasingly more such extensions, such as further adding DSP and JIT
extensions.

It should be a bit messy at first, and calm down later when there's a lot of
frozen extensions that handle most popular tasks.

If anything, I fear calling the 'G' subset was premature. That we're already
talking about RV64GC and not just RV64G does strongly point to that.

~~~
TomVDB
When you deal with complex telecom chips on 28nm and smaller on a daily basis,
it's hard to imagine that a resource savings of just 512 FFs (the difference
between RV32E and RV32I) is worth the trouble!

------
baybal2
> Can MIPS Leapfrog RISC-V?

Not if the company will continue being run by the legal department. From
industry insiders, I heard people having exchanges with them like "you are
gonna fail, thus we are not gonna be working with you..."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701898)

------
twic
How much does open-source hardware really matter? It sounds really cool, and i
hope it takes off. But is this really where the industry is going, or is this
a flash in the pan that gets a lot of attention from people like us?

~~~
lallysingh
Quite a bit! Look at all the places Linux ended up. Servers, phones, embedded
systems, etc. The freedom to modify and tinker encourages innovation. The cost
encourages cheap experimentation.

~~~
dragontamer
The difference is that most of us don't own million-dollar fabrication labs.
At best, we would be tinkering with FPGAs with custom cores, but FPGAs are an
order-of-magnitude slower than traditional CPU ASICs.

So we the typical user can't make use of open source designs.

\------

An open source "conglomerate" of companies may work. But I haven't fully
thought about the economics of it.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Linux is funded by billion dollar companies
([https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/)),
and it is put into phones & cloud servers by billion dollar companies.

~~~
dragontamer
How many of those billion dollar companies own a fab?

Realistically, only Samsung, Intel, and TSMC can make next-generation chips.
(Global Foundries just quit the 7nm race. They're going to be stuck at 12nm).
Intel is fully proprietary tech, so that leaves Samsung and TSMC as the only
companies that make chips for other companies.

At the end of the day, an open-source chip isn't really much benefit when
there are only two manufacturers of chips.

~~~
jdsully
Intel actually does do contract fab work - they just happen to be really bad
at it so they don't get much business.

But there is a long tail of chip-making at older nodes to reduce cost, and for
analogue integration. Risc-V is getting its start here. I hope we'll see a
practical desktop version at some point, but that's not necessary for Risc-V
to win.

------
jononor
Too little too late probably. But openness and competition is good!

------
saagarjha
> MIPS’ target customers will include Arm licensees looking for alternatives.

> MIPS’ advantages over competitors are many. Its instruction sets already
> have extensions such as SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) and DSP.

But…ARM has those things?

~~~
soapdog
ARM has those things but MIPS, once this process is completed, will be open
source. This makes a difference regarding license pay.

~~~
justincormack
Also you can modify the instruction set, which you cannot do with Arm. Risc-V
has a detailed model of which bits you can change,what is the common core and
so on, which Mips will need too.

~~~
Vogtinator
ARM has vendor extension space as well. Intel used that for DSP and "Wireless
MMX" in their Xscale CPUs.

------
growlist
I'd really like to some new OS efforts to go along with new chips. Does it
really have to be *nix on everything?

~~~
pjc50
If it can't run a browser, adoption is going to be crippled, and porting a
browser to a new OS is a much bigger project than writing your own OS.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Such defeatism is why we have to put up with clunky 50 year old abstractions
and the over-complicated "ecosystem" of webshit we built on top of them.

~~~
pjc50
(firstly, this is kind of off topic, since OS design is usually orthogonal to
processor architecture, unless you've got something really funky going on)

Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative
to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. There have been plenty of
minority, research, or experimental operating systems over the past few
decades. Hardly any of them persisted, because it's a very Darwinian winner-
take-all market.

~~~
pdimitar
> _Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an
> alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it 's realism._

IMO this is bit of a "the chicken or the egg came first?" problem.

The industry had a lot of needs in terms of computing when computers started
becoming physically small. The very first few things -- OS, any tech
paradigmae, chip designs, shell architecture and what-have-you -- that seemed
to do the job good enough got 99.9% of investments and mindshare and thus even
if everything we currently use is ugly and barely working, there's no economic
interest to revisit the other competing standards from the dawn of computing
and see if there are golden geese hidden in there somewhere.

So when a carpenter tells you "I need a natural wood and screws because that's
what works best" you really should be reading that as: "nobody tried to invent
better materials and joinery techniques or tooling so I'll stick to what I
know".

"Good enough" is not a slogan to follow.

~~~
snazz
I really want to see an introspective, single-user, programming-centric,
graphical operating system that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common
denominator. A new ISA seems like a great opportunity to ditch the current
models of computing for something more Genera-esque, since we now can produce
commodity hardware that is powerful enough to achieve good performance at
reasonable prices.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
You and me both. I want something I can actually feel like I'm in control of
because it not only respects me as a user but also is built on simple
metaphors that map well to reality, allowing me to actually understand how it
works without untangling a horrible spaghetti mess of legacy systems patched
together with spit and rubberbands. Something meant to help me make my life
better instead of making someone else a bunch of money making me miserable.

Sadly, I'm not aware of anybody working on such a project. Most people making
"OS"s these days either just make yet-another-linux-distribution and confirm
that old saying about the definition of insanity, or they're content to make
some completely academic kernel that no one can use for anything but academic
purposes. I wish I had the skills to start one myself.

~~~
snazz
How useful would a full-screen GUI application that runs on existing operating
systems be? That way eliminates dealing with device drivers or building custom
hardware.

The Lisp-all-the-way-down part doesn’t seem as useful as it was originally.
You could get 80% of the functionality with 10% of the work of a full OS.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> The Lisp-all-the-way-down part doesn’t seem as useful as it was originally.
> You could get 80% of the functionality with 10% of the work of a full OS.

You're missing the point. If the only goal was "functionality," a quick-and-
dirty hack on top of existing systems would suffice.

However, the GP wants a system that's reasonably comprehensible all the way
down, so he can have some confidence that it's not working against him in some
way. The accidental complexity of decades of legacy software works strongly
against that.

~~~
snazz
I completely agree with you, which is why my highest-level comment in this
thread suggested using a new ISA, too. However, for practical reasons, it
would be a ton of work to design and build hardware and a complete operating
system. That’s the holy grail, of course, but it’s going to be hard to achieve
without a large company backing it up.

------
JoachimS
Here is some more info about the MIPS Open community MIPS is trying to
establish:

[https://www.mips.com/mipsopen/](https://www.mips.com/mipsopen/)

Based on the FAQ, older MIPS architectures, for example Release 5 is not
included, only Release 6. I don't see any info about what the exact license
they plan to use.

------
fit2rule
Give me a big fat MIPS pizza box for the 21st Century, and I'm in. Give me a
pocketable mobile MIPS device, and I'm in as well.

As long as they both work together as platforms.

------
snvzz
>Swift added, “The 30+ year legacy of MIPS architecture should mean something.
It’s a value.”

This reads so desperate. "should mean something" betrays they're not even sure
themselves.

------
mtgx
The general rule to this type of question titles is that the answer is NO,
right?

~~~
muyuu
usually it goes like "technically yes but in practice no"

