
MIPS Creator CI20 development board now available for $65 - alexvoica
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/mips-creator-ci20-development-board-now-available
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pdknsk
Sorry, but I'm incredibly wary of anything Linux related from Img,
particularly drivers. Poulsbo was a fiasco, and the situation has not improved
significantly since. (And it's not just Linux. Intel had to delay the N2800
and related CPUs for several quarters because Img struggled to deliver stable
Windows drivers.)

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Alupis
The same can be said about a lot of embedded projects. The fact is they all
have custom hardware, which require custom drivers, etc.

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api
... and the number of people who can write that kind of code -- low-level
driver code -- is pretty small.

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api
Why do all these boards have 100mbps Ethernet?

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analognoise
Because it's cheap?

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alexvoica
Because it's lower power.

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wolfgke
The UK store only offers credit card as payment option. Not in all EU
countries owning a credit card is common (I don't). So please offer a kind of
payment that is common in the EU (for me: Germany) (say, direct debit (in
German: Lastschrift) or at least SEPA credit transfer). Paypal, for example,
offers direct debit.

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alexvoica
Please let me know if you have any questions.

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ensignavenger
Are there any good web pages or resources that offer a good high level
overview of the differences between MIPS and ARM architectures generally?

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monocasa
It's a pretty standard RISC about halfway between SH4 and ARM in
RISCiness(TM).

It's memory map is a little different. (For MIPS32 at least, not sure what
KSEG of MIPS64 looks like) 80000000-9FFFFFFF is fixed to a cached view of the
first 512MB of physical memory. A0000000-BFFFFFFF is fixed to an uncached
view. Everything else is only accessible by mapping it via the MMU (both from
a physical and virtual context). Last I played with MIPS cores, they were only
soft fill TLBs, but maybe that's changed. Thumb2 is more expressive than
MIPS16 IMO (but that's just, like, my opinion, man).

Other than that, the microarchitectual differences between individual
implementations greatly outweigh the influence of the ISA, but for an in order
design at least you can probably make a MIPS that'll compete well with an ARM
for less transistors.

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agumonkey
I'm still surprised no company released a rpi A+ competitor using a simpler
SoC (without the GPU running a rt kernel to drive USB to drive piggybacking
eth link)

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sigjuice
Is ETAG some sort of JTAG variant? If yes, does OpenOCD have support for this
ETAG interface?

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alexvoica
It is a type of connector for MIPS debug probes. Probably the best place to
ask for more info is
[http://forum.imgtec.com/categories/creator](http://forum.imgtec.com/categories/creator)

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bch
How does this compare/contrast w/ (eg) Raspberry Pi or similar ?

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alexvoica
Here is quick breakdown:

Newer/faster processor: 1.2 GHz dual-core MIPS32 vs. 700 MHz single-core ARMV6
More memory: 1 GB DDR3 vs. 512 MB DDR2 More storage options: 4 GB of flash +
SD card expansion vs. microSD expansion Better connectivity: Ethernet + Wi-Fi
+ Bluetooth vs. Ethernet-only Wider operating system support: Linux + Android
vs. Linux only.

I've ran some Linux/Android benchmarks on it and will publish the results in
an article soon.

