ImgTech Announces "Furian" GPU Architecture

[mlau]

I'm still waiting for a 64-bit MIPS (P6600) + PowerVR processor demo board with free drivers. It's been years since the MIPS acquisition, new cores have been announced, but nothing has materialized so far. Even the russians of Baikal Technology have switched from the M5xxx mips cores to arm64.
The CI20 board has poor drivers (especially for the powervr on it) and poor mainline linux support in general, the cpu has a proprietary simd instruction set that isn't supported by a mainline compiler; the ci40 board I have no idea what the target audience is. ImgTec is doing this all wrong, nvidia at least puts out a demoboard for their new stuff once in a while!

[AlexFonewn]

I'm still waiting for a 64-bit MIPS (P6600) + PowerVR processor demo board with free drivers. It's been years since the MIPS acquisition, new cores have been announced, but nothing has materialized so far. Even the russians of Baikal Technology have switched from the M5xxx mips cores to arm64.
The CI20 board has poor drivers (especially for the powervr on it) and poor mainline linux support in general, the cpu has a proprietary simd instruction set that isn't supported by a mainline compiler; the ci40 board I have no idea what the target audience is. ImgTec is doing this all wrong, nvidia at least puts out a demoboard for their new stuff once in a while!

Totally agree. Really sad that they are not properly promoting the MIPS architecture. On the other hand it is well known that ImgTec is struggling to get out of financial trouble lately, and they even announced like a month ago that they will not be developing MIPS for the same segment that ARM A cores focus on. They will just focus on MIPS for the very low-power end, like IoT devices and such. And finally the last bit is how terrible they are in terms of open source support. Even Amlogic, and even fu..ng Allwinner are working to get better Linux support, at least in some cases, like the Allwinner R8 inside the CHIP and PocketCHIP devices or the A64 on the PIne64 boards.

http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=587&page=26

I wonder how it is possible that a company like this do not see of strategical importance their open source efforts. I would like them to succeed, but I don't see it happening. They should just have a look at what ARM is doing now that they have CPUs and GPUs too.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

ImgTek and nVidia announced their newer SoCs, while situation with drivers is essentially the same (blobs-only) just look how different reception...

[mlau]

to me, iot is just another buzzword, an attempt to forcibly create a market where there is really no demand.

The fate of MIPS is sad, really. When I started working with MIPS over 10 years ago, the cores were good (not exceptional),
but software support was atrocious. MIPS Technologies at the time more or less just sat there and watched ARM
take away their market. It tells a lot when licensors, like Cavium, were the ones attempting to drive mips forward.
When it was announced that imgtec would buy mips I was hoping that they would rejuvenate it. They kind of did,
but then seemed to run out of steam after 2-3 years. Improvements to mips software (toolchain and kernel/drivers)
are progressing very slowly now. I'm sure their sw engineers are doing their best, but they seem to have lost company
support...

[droidhacker]

The fate of MIPS is sad, really. When I started working with MIPS over 10 years ago, the cores were good (not exceptional),
but software support was atrocious. MIPS Technologies at the time more or less just sat there and watched ARM
take away their market. It tells a lot when licensors, like Cavium, were the ones attempting to drive mips forward.
When it was announced that imgtec would buy mips I was hoping that they would rejuvenate it. They kind of did,
but then seemed to run out of steam after 2-3 years. Improvements to mips software (toolchain and kernel/drivers)
are progressing very slowly now. I'm sure their sw engineers are doing their best, but they seem to have lost company
support...

Its pretty bad now, there is really NO market segment left for MIPS. A few years ago, at least they had the low end stuff (like cheap routers), but now we are seeing them being replaced all with ARM chips, which have really taken off. Considering that ARM used to only fill the power efficient general purpose ultra mobile niche, now they've got everything from as low as budget MCU's right up to servers.

[microcode]

Totally agree. Really sad that they are not properly promoting the MIPS architecture. On the other hand it is well known that ImgTec is struggling to get out of financial trouble lately, and they even announced like a month ago that they will not be developing MIPS for the same segment that ARM A cores focus on. They will just focus on MIPS for the very low-power end, like IoT devices and such. And finally the last bit is how terrible they are in terms of open source support. Even Amlogic, and even fu..ng Allwinner are working to get better Linux support, at least in some cases, like the Allwinner R8 inside the CHIP and PocketCHIP devices or the A64 on the PIne64 boards.

http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=587&page=26

I wonder how it is possible that a company like this do not see of strategical importance their open source efforts. I would like them to succeed, but I don't see it happening. They should just have a look at what ARM is doing now that they have CPUs and GPUs too.

I think I'll be shocked if Apple doesn't just buy ImgTec while they're struggling.

[Hi-Angel]

Its pretty bad now, there is really NO market segment left for MIPS. A few years ago, at least they had the low end stuff (like cheap routers), but now we are seeing them being replaced all with ARM chips, which have really taken off. Considering that ARM used to only fill the power efficient general purpose ultra mobile niche, now they've got everything from as low as budget MCU's right up to servers.

There still is China with their Loongson CPUs. I'm wondering btw how far they got in using it.

[rabcor]

Only the original unless you think Kevin Dillion is a good stand-in for Mcqueen.

Well if you've never seen the first one and you're not comparing the remake to the first one this won't be a problem. I only saw the remake, cus I'm not in a retirement home yet.

[liam]

Well if you've never seen the first one and you're not comparing the remake to the first one this won't be a problem. I only saw the remake, cus I'm not in a retirement home yet.

Are you sure not in a retirement community yet? If you aren't you should have your kids start looking into it because there's this neat thing called the internet which seems to offer every movie ever made.
Remember, it's never too early to make plans for tomorrow!

[AlexFonewn]

There still is China with their Loongson CPUs. I'm wondering btw how far they got in using it.

But I still think that any dev board released with a "decent" (even as low as equivalen to A7 cores) MIPS SoC with FULL linux support would attract many people, for instance, re-release their MIPS Creator Ci-20 with FULL AND PROPER mainline Linux support for, CPU and GPU, would be really cool.

But the thing is that they do not want to commit to proper Linux support, thing that even the Chinese, masters of the "sell and move-on", have now realized, and some of the fixed (Rockchip, Amlogic and some Allwinner) in a decent amount.