GlobalFoundries to Acquire MIPS

Interesting but complementary foray into owning the end-to-end pipeline of chip design, fabrication, and packaging - especially for embedded use cases.

MIPS has also hitched it's horse to RISC-V now, and I am seeing a critical mass of talent and capital forming in that space.

The critical mass of talent and capital forming in the RISC-V space happened in 02019 at Alibaba: https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/07/27/alibaba-unveils-xuan...

AFAIK MIPS still hasn't shipped a high-end processor competitive with the XuanTie 910 that article is about. And I think the billions of RISC-V microcontroller cores that have shipped already (10 billion as of 02022 according to https://wccftech.com/x86-arm-rival-risc-v-architecture-ships...) are also mostly not from MIPS.

It was some time ago that MIPS did announce that they had competitive RISC-V cores and had signed customers for them: LG and in the automotive sector. I'd think those should be taped out by now, but who knows...

I think the C910 looks better on paper than it performs in practice. I hope that isn't the case for MIPS.

Do you have any details?

Adding to what was said, it also suspiciously looks like a MIPS core with a RISC-V frontend strapped to it sort of like Qualcomm did with their Nuvia AArch64 core. Particularly stuff like the soft fill TLB from m-mode looks just like MIPS coprocessor 0.

There's nothing especially wrong with using an existing backend design and transitioning it to another ISA; a number of teams did that from mips->arm and had success with the result. Of course, if you ship too early you may be missing some features.

> a number of teams did that from mips->arm and had success with the result.

Do you have any examples? Apple Silicon cores took pieces of the pwerficient cores, and everything else I know of either tweaked an official ARM design or started more or less from scratch.