Since Imagination’s acquisition of MIPS at the end of last year, the MIPS product line has been given a new lease of life. There are two things driving this. The first is simply that with its new home, the MIPS architecture has a solid future whereas before it was uncertain. Secondly, Imagination moved their own general purpose… Read More
Increasingly, a GPU is misnamed as a “graphics” processing unit. They are really specialized architecture highly parallel compute engines. You can use these compute engines for graphics, of course, but people are inventive and find ways of using GPUs for other tasks that can take advantage of the highly parallel… Read More
Imagination seems to be well known for a couple of things. Firstly, everyone knows that it is the graphics processor used in the iPhone and the iPad and lots of other phones. And they know that Imagination acquired MIPS at the start of this year.
But what people don’t seem to really appreciate is just what a huge portfolio of IP… Read More
Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said “the rich are not like other people” to Ernest Hemingway (he didn’t). In the same way, processors are not like other blocks, and not because they have more gates (they don’t). However, special approaches to optimizing processors are important because the clock… Read More
You are probably aware that Imagination Technologies, perhaps most well known for creating the GPU that is in the iPhone and iPad, acquired MIPS, which was originally a spinout from Silicon Graphics and licenses a line of general purpose microprocessors.
MIPS considers that they have a purer implementation of the RISC philosophy… Read More
The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.
The most “glamorous” processor in a smartphone is the one in the application… Read More
I was at the Linley Mobile Microprocessor conference earlier in the week. Well, just the first day since the second day overlapped with the GSA Silicon Summit. The first surprise was seeing Mike Demler in a suit. It turns out that he has joined the Linley Group as a full-time analyst in the mobile space.
Linley Gwennap started the day… Read More
We have seen in a previous post that Imagination Technologies has proposed to buy MIPS, in fact “MIPS operating business and certain patent properties, as well as license rights to all of the remaining patent properties”. Translated into understandable language Imagination has offered $60M for MIPS Processor IP core portfolio,… Read More
As George E.P. Box said, “essentially all models are wrong but some are useful.” That is certainly the case with Carbon’s models. For processors they have two models, one that is fast (but not timing-accurate) and one that is accurate (but not fast). But both are useful.
Carbon attended the ARM TechCon in Santa… Read More
It was not really a surprise to learn that, finally, MIPS have been sold, as the company was officially for sale since April 2012. Nevertheless, the interesting part of this news comes from the buyer’ identity: Imagination Technologies. Imagination is an UK based company, like ARM, selling processor IP cores, like ARM, but the … Read More
