Hacker News Reader

Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

> VThe problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China

yet

> Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM l

ARM -> RISC, as ARM is not the only game in town. For example, at the moment I am having a lot of fun with a Unielec u7621 board (2 mini PCIe, mSata and USB3 with hardware accelerated NAT to handle 1Gbps) that costed me about $45 : https://openwrt.org/toh/unielec/u7621-06

I would love to see MIPS64 SOCs with a few GBs of RAM to replace my raspberries

View on HN

This is a pretty weak rebuttal, the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24K

All of the MT7621"s speed is from ASICs that accelerate NAT & WPA2, without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along.

More competitive offerings like the OrangePi PC Plus ($19) and FriendlyARM boards based on Allwinner chips offer much nore performance for the dollar, but these are literally foriegn IP blocks Allwinner licensed, glued together and sent off to a 45n or 28nm fab to have manufactured. Most of the work Allwinner did for these chips was on a trashcan ready, buggy board support package.

> the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005

Yes, I'm having a lot offun with a 14 year old CPU, so I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali

> without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along

Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.

> I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali

The Mali drivers that were just mainlined last month aren't necessarily feature complete like Intel, Via or AMD GPU drivers. Mali is licensed from ARM, which would be a showstopper for US embargoed companies.

> Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.

If MIPS64 were competitive on price, we would have a plethora of tablets & boards based on it. Currently, dated Mips 24k cores are a $0.10 afterthought that is used to boot and initialize the dedicated ASICs. We've started seeing ARM cores eat the router market though, they're likely delivering more performance for that $0.10.

I care more about freedom than performance here. Not feature complete is fine as long as it works for what I do, and that I can tweak it to do more.

Eventually, something that is not licensed from a western company (or which can't be protected by IP law) but that is fast enough for most uses will also become a $0.10 afterthought.

The mips24k is remarkable in that you can comfortably run a linux kernel with a lot of userland utilities and even text mode software -- just what we used to run on Linux computers many years ago!

MIPS is a product of Wave Designs in California. We're years away from a non-western influenced CPU being commercially available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com