MIPS I7200 Breaks the RISC Chain | Hacker News Reader

MIPS I7200 Breaks the RISC Chain

eejournal.com

26 pointstfmkevin9 comments

Variable length instructions, so long as they're easy to decode, have always been present in the range of ISAs commonly called "RISC" and this new one from MIPS is no different. Except for the encoding it's basically the same thing MIPS has always been.

Yep. RISC-V has had easy to decode variable length instructions from day one in the compressed ISA extension. The base user-mode ISA has a set of simple encoding rules for variable-length instructions from 16b to 192b in 16b increments, and room to grow beyond that should the need arise. The current set of extensions only use 32b and 16b encoding space.

Variable length instructions are not un-RISC, nor is macro-op fusion. Sure it makes for great clickbait, but nothing here indicates a new break from RISC. MIPS is already un-RISC in more real ways.

Now if only there was somebody besides Microchip making low-cost dev kits for these things, maybe we could have some fun and get a MIPS revival.

I can get ARM microcontroller boards for $10 - $20 from ST, Microchip (nee Atmel), SiLabs, etc. More powerful ARMs in any flavor of Pi that I want.

Where do I buy a low-end interAptive or microAptive board? The Creator CI20 is super interesting, but no on-board debugger included. The LinkIt MT7688 modules don't even bring out the JTAG pins.

PIC32MZ are MIPS based, not quite what you want but close.

Agreed. The PIC32MZ is a neat MIPS microcontroller (if you're able to tolerate the MPLab Xpress IDE). Unfortunately the cheapest PIC32 board they offer is the DM320001 at $50. I picked up a SAMD10 "Xplained mini" for $9 from Digikey, and one can get sub-$2 STM32F103 boards from AliExpress.

Arguably the Cortex-M0+-based D10 isn't really comparable to the PIC32, but that's sort of the point. No Arduino-sized community is going to develop around an architecture with a $50 minimum entry point... Maybe I should stop complaining about it and try to fix it :-)

Even with an adblocker, the site is unusable.

You just have to take it a bit farther and block everything by default except the HTML using something like uMatrix. It's often a pain in the ass when I do want to see more than the text (and of course some sites require javascript to even get the text) but most of the time I just want to read the text and combined with Reader mode it's even formatted well, often better than the original site, for my tastes anyway.

Im on mobile with uBlock Origin, nothing got in my way.

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