Android Applications Soon To Run On MIPS32 Chips

OrangHutan writes "Google's Android software source code has been offered up for those looking to create applications on MIPS32 chips, which are different from Intel's x86 architecture and used by companies such as Cisco (in its Linksys devices), Motorola (set-top boxes) and Sony (DVD players). MIPS Technologies made the announcement on Monday and is giving 'software developers an early access program for customers, which will give them access to MIPS engineers and specific hardware and software optimizations.' The article goes on to say that MIPS made waves at the 'Computex electronics exhibition in Taipei by showing off a home media player and a 10.4-inch LCD with a built-in computer both running Android. They were among the first non-phones to be seen running the Google-developed OS.'"

PSP is MIPS

[sjf]

Hmm. Interesting

Re:holy fuck!

[SpinyNorman]

I guess the slashdot editors are just acknowledging the new slashdot demographic.

Of course it's have been better if they'd also noted that MIPS != ARM since ARM is what Android actually runs on.

Why MIPS Matters

[TheRaven64]

MIPS used to be the architecture that companies like SGI used for their high-end workstations. It was also briefly used in a few handheld systems. A few years ago, however, the Chinese government decided that they didn't want to have their information infrastructure relying on foreign-designed and (often) foreign-manufactured CPUs. They created the Longsoon project to design a home-grown CPU. The ISA that they chose to implement is MIPS (little-endian variant). The latest versions are full MIPS64 implementations and are reasonably low power (think Atom, not ARM). They are also very, very, cheap. Laptops containing them are on the market now and are much cheaper than their Atom equivalents. The next version, due in the next few months, is expected to draw 10W for four 1.2GHz cores.

The 2F, which is currently the version shipping in cheap laptops, is fabbed on a very old process technology (two generations behind the Atom) but still manages to give decent performance per Watt. It will be interesting to see how quickly the Chinese catch up with the fabrication technology and how they improve the design in the next few years. It's also worth noting that the 3 series has a load of extra instructions that make it easy to emulate x86 and the published benchmarks show x86 code running in QEMU on the pre-release chips runs at around 70% of the speed of native MIPS code. Even if it's only 50%, that's probably enough for a lot of legacy apps.

Re:holy fuck!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, it does run on x86. live-android [google.com]

Re:Why MIPS Matters

[TheRaven64]

Which bit do you want a citation for? The wikipedia page on Loongson [wikipedia.org] contains a lot of relevant citations at the bottom - and would have been your first hit if you'd bothered to Google. The people who I know who have bought them paid under 200 Euros, which is a fair bit less than the cheapest x86 laptops I've seen.

Re:Necessity

[TheRaven64]

Loongson is a MIPS32 chip

Only the old ones. The new ones (Loongson 2, 500MHz+) are all MIPS64.

Re:where are the phones?

[mjwx]

yes, I'm quite aware of your bountiful phone selection. strangely your british phones don't do anything for me. you get android phones first, we get cars for about half the cost. I guess it all evens out in the end.

Thats OK, you can have slightly cheaper motor vehicles, we'd rather have a healthy banking system and stable economy.

Also I'm Australian you drongo, we haven't had to bail out a single company.