Imagination Technologies is a British company that has recently entered full production of a board based on MIPS computer architecture. The single-board computer has been designed to allow developers to create applications for mobiles, gaming, Internet of Things, and wearables.
Interesting, and more exotic, alternative to the Pi.
This would be an AWESOME little board for emulation purposes. It has an Ingenic chip which is the same as the Dingoo and other emulation handhelds. Albeit much faster.
I have one of these. It’s a very nice board indeed.
I’ve bought one of these and while it doesn’t have the vast ecosystem of the Pi it’s still an interesting board. I chose it over the Pi 2 because I wanted to use it as a router & VPN server and it comes with on-board wireless connectivity and storage which made it cheaper than an equivalent setup made using the Pi 2.
Dreaming about run irix over one little board….
Even though it always seems to be an uphill battle, I welcome the competition of multiple CPU architectures.
MIPS is a good platform, and I’m glad to see it represented in the growing hobbyist field.
Uhhh…why? What does this do that X86 and ARM does not? What does it bring to the table that is better than the other 2?
Frankly the only interesting chip to come out of MIPS in the past 20 years can’t be sold in the west due to IP laws (The Loongson MIPS uses hardware X86 acceleration which lets it run X86 programs at 80% native speed) so what we do see from the MIPS camp isn’t as easy on the battery as ARM or even a fifth as fast as X86, so what advantage does it actually bring to the table?
First, forget about x86 and look at what OSs MIPS boards can run like irix. But don’t stop there. Look in wiki and see what MIPS runs and you’ll learn a lot.
Also, did you read the attached article?
Edited 2015-03-17 19:09 UTC
This isn’t Loongson… and doesn’t have the x86 emulation bits.
Also Loongson couldn’t be sold here because it claimed to be mips but had no license but thats old news. STMicroelectronics has had a license to make them since 2007.
This is the offspring of MIPS Technologies MIPS processors which are now owned by Imagination Technologies (Almost or as evil as Nvidia….) this processor has a direct heritage back to the original MIPS company wise anyway…
… But it’s difficult to see how this board has any advantages over a Raspberry PI 2… I’m tempted to get one just to run some A B tests… 🙂