Items tagged with MIPS
Imagination Technologies has announced the first CPU based on its new version of the MIPS architecture. The new P5600 chip (codenamed Warrior) is a 32-bit CPU based on the MIPS Series 5 architecture and is designed to challenge companies like ARM in the embedded and mobile markets. Major features of the new chip include: Support for 40-bit memory extensions, or up to 1TB of RAM rather than the typical 4GB limit associated with 32-bit processors. It's worth noting that there's typically a significant performance hit associated with this kind of work-around for memory addressing in 32-bit chips. A 128-bit SIMD engine (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Companies like ARM, Intel, and AMD use various...
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You don’t hear a lot about MIPS Technologies, Inc., but the company’s technology is important to the embedded processor industry and is found in millions of devices. It’s also apparently important to chip designers Imagination Technologies and Ceva, Inc. The former has now outbid the latter and is buying MIPS for $100 million. The two companies had been embroiled in a bidding war, but Reuters reports that in the end, Ceva wasn’t willing to pony up any more cash and conceded victory to Imagination. Imagination is taking a bit of a risk here, as the company will reportedly need to borrow as much as $22 million to complete the purchase. It will be competing with ARM in the...
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The Chinese have been climbing up the supercomputing staircase for some years; the country's upgraded Tianhe-I system is currently in the lead out of the TOP500. Despite Tianhe-I's success, it may be the last supercomputer China builds using both Intel and NVIDIA parts. (The Tianhe-I originally used 2,560 Radeon 4870 X2 cards, these were later swapped out for NV Tesla M2050 boards.) According to Hu Wei, lead designer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's next TOP500 contender (the Dawning will run mostly, if not entirely, on Chinese-designed microprocessors. Chinese developers have been working on their own CPU architecture for years; China has made no secret of the fact that it wants...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago… Intel Previews 32nm Itanium "Poulson" Processor...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago. Here's the sneak peak To discuss why, we'll have to flip through some history. From Merced to Tukwila Intel began work on what would become Itanium back in 1994 in a joint venture with HP. The two...
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Rumors of a PlayStation phone (and PSP users' interest in same) has swirled around the Internet since the original PSP-2000 launched, but Sony has never commented on the question of whether or not it would actually bring such a device to market. Ever since Nokia's N-Gage disaster, phone manufacturers and console developers alike have looked askance at the idea of a combination device. The advent of touch technology and the recent surge in smartphone capabilities may have established phones as popular gaming platforms, but no one has had the guts to attempt to marry the two functionalities again. It's a little-known fact, but failure is actually shaped just like a taco This alleged prototype has...
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