MIPS Processor ISA To Be Open-Sourced In 2019

[phoronix]

Phoronix: MIPS Processor ISA To Be Open-Sourced In 2019

Months after MIPS Technologies was acquired by Wave Computing, the company announced it's working on open-sourcing the MIPS processor instruction set architecture...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MIPS-Open-Source-2019

[benjamin545]

This is pretty cool, I always thought that mips was the closest to an open ISA before riscv and openrisc due to its use in the universities for teaching. (Although I make no mistake in thinking it was actualy "open source hardware") how will this affect this newfound appreciation for riscv? Mips has a lot of history and infanstructure behind it, but how much of that is open as well? How open is mips going to be really? And how much will open sourcing the ISA help interest in it, the momentum for mips is on the decline while interest for riscv is on the rise.

[onicsis]

To late. POWER it's already hier. Maybe MIPS it's more suited for embedded systems.

[starshipeleven]

To late. POWER it's already hier. Maybe MIPS it's more suited for embedded systems.

Yeah, MIPS is relatively common in cheap embedded stuff like house routers and similar. POWER's lower end is still serious businness appliance hardware (router/firewall/whatever).

Although is POWER actually an opensource ISA? I'm not following it that closely.

[torsionbar28]

This is pretty cool, I always thought that mips was the closest to an open ISA before riscv and openrisc due to its use in the universities for teaching.

x2, who else here has spent waaay too many hours on grad school homework, porting assembly language code between MARIE and MIPS? -raises hand-

[torsionbar28]

Yeah, MIPS is relatively common in cheap embedded stuff like house routers and similar. POWER's lower end is still serious businness appliance hardware (router/firewall/whatever).

Although is POWER actually an opensource ISA? I'm not following it that closely.

Agreed, MIPS is more of an ARM competitor, while POWER is an x86-64 competitor. Two very different markets.

Side note, Isn't SPARC also an open ISA these days?

[xorbe]

Can't someone pry Alpha out of Intel's dustbin?

[AndyChow]

Agreed, MIPS is more of an ARM competitor, while POWER is an x86-64 competitor. Two very different markets.

Side note, Isn't SPARC also an open ISA these days?

SPARC T1 and T2 has been open since 2007, but to my knowledge, no one has ever fabbed one. Damn shame, because the T2 had 8 cores, 16 pipelines with 64 threads. Today not "THAT" impressive, but in 2007 it was good.

Having an open ISA doesn't mean that much. Even an open RTL schematic. You still need someone to fab the thing.

[benjamin545]

I thought power was not open like riscv is. More like if you join the organization that ibm and freescale are in you could make your own implementation of the power ISA that conforms to the standard. Kind of like how opengl was an open standard but you had to pay to join the organization to make a "opengl" implementation.

[uid313]

Great!

About time!
I wish this happened much sooner.

It feels like it is a desperate move out of fear to fade into irrelevance with the arrival of RISC-V which is gaining momentum. I wish they had done this long ago out of own free will instead.