Cheap Android tablets are all over the place, and generally not any good. They often have resistive touch screens instead of capacitive ones, are slow, or have no access to the Android Market. For Ice Cream Sandwich, MIPS Technologies is trotting out its existing Honeycomb tablet - which, you guessed it, uses a MIPS processor - licensed to Ainovo. For some reason, that makes this $99 tablet with capacitive screen kind of interesting.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Having a Playstation or PS2 (oh, only the best-selling console in history, overall; and PS1: 2nd best-selling among non-handhelds), also an early PS3 model with hardware "emulation" of PS2, or maybe one of many consumer WiFi routers & NAS devices, brings geek points?
Hm, OK then.
Didn't Thom have, IIRC, a PS2 at some point? That's two MIPS processors right there... (the 2nd taking over as a main one in PS1 mode)
Member since:2005-07-06
I also prefer MIPS ISA because it can trap on integer overflow which is nice for efficient Ada compilation.
But unfortunately nearly nobody use a language with this (nice) behaviour instead of stupid C/C++ or Java's behaviour on integer overflow, so it doesn't really matter: both ISAs are quite nice, much better than x86 anyway.
Member since:2011-01-28
renox,
"I also prefer MIPS ISA because it can trap on integer overflow which is nice for efficient Ada compilation. "
You may be right about mips handling overflow better than x86, but I actually don't mind the way the x86 does it.
ADD [edi], dword 5 # cause overflow
JO xyz # optionally handle overflow
INTO # generate an interrupt on overflow
ADC [edi+4], dword 0 # add carry
CMOVO [edi], ... # clip the range
# do nothing, modulo arithmetic is often desirable.
"But unfortunately nearly nobody use a language with this (nice) behaviour instead of stupid C/C++ or Java's behaviour on integer overflow, so it doesn't really matter"
I share the same gripe of the C language. It offers no way to use or act upon the overflow, leading to less efficient algorithms.
Also, I think modulo arithmetic should be made explicit. Languages like C/Java that implicitly discard overflow information lead to bugs regardless of architecture. New languages should automatically assert errors on overflow unless told to do otherwise.
Member since:
2011-05-31
I'm with Thom on this. Having a MIPS based device would definitely give you some geek points. Brings back memories of my assembly language class that used a MIPS emulator. ARM is so 3rd quarter 2011