Linux Kernel Support For The Loongson-3

[uid313]

Does MIPS compete against ARM, or are they competing against x86 or who?

How does MIPS compare against other architectures?
Is MIPS more open than any other architectures?

Why would I want a Loongson CPU instead of any other CPU?
Does it offer anything that others don't? Does it have any advantage?

[89c51]

Does MIPS compete against ARM, or are they competing against x86 or who?

How does MIPS compare against other architectures?
Is MIPS more open than any other architectures?

Why would I want a Loongson CPU instead of any other CPU?
Does it offer anything that others don't? Does it have any advantage?

I think it has been used in products ranging from portable devices to high performance stuff. As for openness i think the only architecture that is open is SPARC.

For performance advantages disadvantages etc more knowledgeable people will answer you.

[chithanh]

MIPS competes with ARM in tablets and ultraportables for example. A somewhat popular SoC is the Ingenic JZ4770 which is used in many low-end 7" Android tablets (The first Android 4.0 tablet, the Novo7 Basic, used that SoC).

How the Ingenic MIPS SoC compares to various ARM based ones in benchmarks is easily found with a Google search.

Regarding the openness of the MIPS architecture: The designs are of course copyright protected. The instruction set contains some instructions for unaligned memory access which are patent encumbered. Early Loongsoon CPUs (2E and before) contained workarounds for the patented instructions, but now STMicro has purchased a license from MIPS Technologies so the workarounds could be dropped.

[JanC]

SGI already had full-blown hardware graphics acceleration in the '80s (the company was formed to make graphics hardware) so if OpenGL was designed for any specific hardware it's probably more correct to say that OpenGL was designed for the SGI graphics accelerators of the time than for MIPS CPUs.

It's similar to how these laptops have a MIPS CPU and an AMD GPU, of course. But maybe I should have said that it was designed "for MIPS workstations" instead of "for MIPS". Also, I think that at least part of (Open)GL ran on the CPU, so some design decisions might actually be influenced by MIPS?

[JanC]

As for openness i think the only architecture that is open is SPARC.

There is also OpenRISC, which is probably even more open than OpenSPARC...

[mlau]

Do any MIPS systems have OpenGL support? Because if they don't that's a pretty hefty chunk of packages that aren't available.

Putting gpu stuff aside, Maybe the entire stable release of MIPS is available but we all know how ancient that is, in Linux years anyway. I'm sure a lot of Sid or wheezy is available for MIPS but I'm sure it breaks more often than x86 or ARM.

I run Gentoo with KDE on a few MIPS toys; it's surprisingly stable and gives no more headaches than say ARM (i.e. the usual
problems with source written with x86 in mind).

I like MIPS, it's a really nice architecture. But it hasn't really progressed a lot since the 64bit R4000 was introduced 20 years ago.
A bit beefier FPU (or ARM-style NEON/VFP units; MIPS-3D never really caught traction), a new release of
the MIPS32/MIPS64 spec with cruft removed and modern features added (no more optional features) and of
course more love for the entire toolchain: it's lagging behind ARM feature-wise and at least GCC no longer considers MIPS important
and therefore only receives attention from some interested third parties, the ABI is known to be a bit cumbersome.

[necro-lover]

I run Gentoo with KDE on a few MIPS toys; it's surprisingly stable and gives no more headaches than say ARM (i.e. the usual
problems with source written with x86 in mind).

I like MIPS, it's a really nice architecture. But it hasn't really progressed a lot since the 64bit R4000 was introduced 20 years ago.
A bit beefier FPU (or ARM-style NEON/VFP units; MIPS-3D never really caught traction), a new release of
the MIPS32/MIPS64 spec with cruft removed and modern features added (no more optional features) and of
course more love for the entire toolchain: it's lagging behind ARM feature-wise and at least GCC no longer considers MIPS important
and therefore only receives attention from some interested third parties, the ABI is known to be a bit cumbersome.

Your MIPS talk has nothing to do with loongson because loongson do have a beefier FPU and a SIMD-Vector unit and a SIMD-Integer unit ... 3A do have 2*64bit units and 3B having two 256 bit vector processing units in each core. and 3C do have two 512bit vector units and 1 SIMD-512bit-Integer unit..

so loongson is the upgrade you want.

[blackiwid]

how good ist Loongson cpu or mips in general with idle power consumption, I read that the tdps are 15, 25 or 40W for the 2f, 3a and 3b cpus whats great if you consider that this cpus are build in 65nm technologie. But how much do they need power on idle side? I hope the 3c update is coming soon 28nm would be cool... and maybe some day it would be competitive price-wise... a netbook for 800 euro with 1,5 hours runtime is not really what most people want

[hoohoo]

Godwin's Law proven in only three posts.

Still, poster #2 is deeply sunk in conspiracy theory.

Just maybe China did not want to be beholden to Intel?

[hoohoo]

how good ist Loongson cpu or mips in general with idle power consumption, I read that the tdps are 15, 25 or 40W for the 2f, 3a and 3b cpus whats great if you consider that this cpus are build in 65nm technologie. But how much do they need power on idle side? I hope the 3c update is coming soon 28nm would be cool... and maybe some day it would be competitive price-wise... a netbook for 800 euro with 1,5 hours runtime is not really what most people want

It doesn't matter, China has the Three Gorges Dam ;-)