Tag: processor

During my first trip to China a few years ago, I remember attending a presentation on the newly-announced MIPS Warrior CPU family. One of the keynote speakers used a line that has stuck in my head ever since: The CPU can be a good controller – don’t let it control you. He was absolutely right! At the end of the … Continued

I was recently at the 2015 Linley Processor Conference in San Jose and wanted to share with you some of my observations and takeaways. Imagination had a strong presence at the show with Jim Nicholas, VP of MIPS Business Operations, delivering a talk titled Heterogeneous Systems Architecture: Coming Soon to a Platform Near You. Jim’s presentation was on behalf of … Continued

In the mobile and embedded market, the design constraints of electronic products can sometimes be seen as tight and contradictory: the market demands higher performance yet lower power consumption, reductions in cost but shorter time-to-market. These constraints have created a trend for more specialized hardware designs that fit a particular application; if each task is well matched to a functional … Continued

A few months back I reported on the MIPS-based Mongoose-V chip guiding the New Horizons probe in its quest to reach Pluto. The story captured the headlines of many publications and generated many questions about the MIPS architecture (more on this in a separate article). Today I’d like to focus on another important space mission called Hayabusa-2 that is currently … Continued

This week we found out that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent on a mission to reach Pluto in 2006 came out of hibernation for its long-awaited encounter with the world’s most famous dwarf planet. Traveling across the solar system, the New Horizons spacecraft is now approximately 3.5 billion miles from the Sun, nine years after its launch.   New Horizons … Continued

My colleagues have just returned from the Embedded Technology conference and exhibition, held annually at the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Centre in Japan. ET is one of the world’s largest trade shows for embedded system designers and managers – and Imagination has had yet another impressive presence this year. Among the many demonstrations shown at the event, there were a few … Continued

MIPS is the shining star of the highly efficient, low power CPU design principles that have shaped the mobile and embedded industry for nearly three decades. In this article, I will try to offer you a quick overview of how the MIPS architecture evolved from its early beginnings in the Stanford University computer science labs to the present day. You … Continued

Designing a CPU takes a lot skill and effort. Taking said CPU and reducing its dynamic power consumption by 50% takes a particular set of skills, skills one has acquired over a very long career. After successfully delivering the first DOK for PowerVR Rogue GPUs, Imagination and Synopsys embarked on a second project that aimed at significantly decreasing power consumption … Continued

A recent study from IC Insights found that in 2013 apps processors for smartphones and tablets accounted for 31% of total microprocessor sales, up from 26% in 2012. Companies competing in the mobile arena are well positioned to become the main driving force behind the fast growth of the overall semiconductor industry. When building chipsets for mobile, silicon vendors often … Continued

The newly-announced MIPS M51xx (M5100 and M5150) processors are two important members of the Series5 Warrior family, the most exciting generation of CPUs in the recent history of MIPS. Both M5100 and M5150 are fully synthesizable CPU IP cores that focus on delivering leading performance efficiency and a unique feature set for the MCU and embedded markets. Microcontrollers are a … Continued