
MIPS I7200 Breaks the RISC Chain - tfmkevin
http://www.eejournal.com/article/mips-i7200-breaks-the-chain/
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Symmetry
Variable length instructions, so long as they're easy to decode, have always
been present in the range of ISAs commonly called "RISC" and this new one from
MIPS is no different. Except for the encoding it's basically the same thing
MIPS has always been.

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baobrien
Yep. RISC-V has had easy to decode variable length instructions from day one
in the compressed ISA extension. The base user-mode ISA has a set of simple
encoding rules for variable-length instructions from 16b to 192b in 16b
increments, and room to grow beyond that should the need arise. The current
set of extensions only use 32b and 16b encoding space.

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microcolonel
Variable length instructions are not un-RISC, nor is macro-op fusion. Sure it
makes for great clickbait, but nothing here indicates a new break from RISC.
MIPS is already un-RISC in more real ways.

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bit1
Now if only there was somebody besides Microchip making low-cost dev kits for
these things, maybe we could have some fun and get a MIPS revival.

I can get ARM microcontroller boards for $10 - $20 from ST, Microchip (nee
Atmel), SiLabs, etc. More powerful ARMs in any flavor of Pi that I want.

Where do I buy a low-end interAptive or microAptive board? The Creator CI20 is
super interesting, but no on-board debugger included. The LinkIt MT7688
modules don't even bring out the JTAG pins.

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TickleSteve
PIC32MZ are MIPS based, not quite what you want but close.

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bit1
Agreed. The PIC32MZ is a neat MIPS microcontroller (if you're able to tolerate
the MPLab Xpress IDE). Unfortunately the cheapest PIC32 board they offer is
the DM320001 at $50. I picked up a SAMD10 "Xplained mini" for $9 from Digikey,
and one can get sub-$2 STM32F103 boards from AliExpress.

Arguably the Cortex-M0+-based D10 isn't really comparable to the PIC32, but
that's sort of the point. No Arduino-sized community is going to develop
around an architecture with a $50 minimum entry point... Maybe I should stop
complaining about it and try to fix it :-)

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freeone3000
Even with an adblocker, the site is unusable.

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kencausey
You just have to take it a bit farther and block everything by default except
the HTML using something like uMatrix. It's often a pain in the ass when I do
want to see more than the text (and of course some sites require javascript to
even get the text) but most of the time I just want to read the text and
combined with Reader mode it's even formatted well, often better than the
original site, for my tastes anyway.

