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1996

I will be the dissenting voice and say I prefer MIPS.

Like the Wintel (Windows/Intel) monoculture, ARM brings the GoogleArm monoculture. The Apple/Arm monoculture that some people seem to hope for would be no different: heavily restricted, with fewer possibilities for free software.

MIPS64 offer us a good royaltie-free alternative, to be independent of the western companies (UK/US based)

If Nvidia gets ARM, I fully expect the same shenanigans Intel pulled on X86.

So I hope a third party alternative (MIPS, Sparc, anything) will be there, hopefully with a major fab like Samsung behind it.

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MIPS64 is no longer royalty-free.

Wave Computing Closes Its MIPS Open Initiative with Immediate Effect, Zero Warning

https://www.hackster.io/news/wave-computing-closes-its-mips-...

MIPS future is unclear: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/22/is-mips-dead-lawsuit...

So we're only left with RISCV? Sparc seams a dead end, and power too.

Power ISA isn't dead. Besides IBM's server offerings, you can buy workstations with a POWER9 retail right now. POWER10 is in the works and it's a royalty-free ISA.

That's in addition to all the little embedded cores that are still around.

IBM is actively investing in POWER though

Would be nice if they brought that back into the laptop realm.

There is a project to make a power pc laptop https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ Though it does not use a IBM CPU.

They claim to be using a NXP T2080 CPU as the core of their laptop. This is doomed to failure.

The T2080 is a high-speed communications processor. It is not designed for energy efficiency. It can draw up to 20W at full power, and does not support the sorts of power-saving features that would be required for a mobile part. The datasheet doesn't even specify the processor's idle power consumption! Some of the tables can be read to imply that it might be able to idle down to roughly 7W, but that's still completely unsuitable for a laptop.

Are there other Power processors that might be better suited for a laptop?

Somewhat not by much. NXP has a couple of other QorIQ parts which might fit a laptop application a little better; for instance, the T1040 series (4 cores, 1.5 GHz, 7W TDP) seems like a better fit. IBM's POWER parts are aimed squarely at supercomputing and are completely unsuitable for this use case.

But, quite frankly, none of these parts are really intended for mobile use. There hasn't been any real interest in mobile Power hardware since Apple got out of the business nearly 15 years ago -- ARM cores have utterly dominated that market.

Where is MIPS used these days? I've only seen one MIPS device in the wild (a DOCSIS modem using some domain-specific Broadcom MCU) but I've heard about it plenty over the years.

Routers mostly. I think some set-top-boxes and DVRs also used it.

Shame, it had quite the history from being in all those old SGI machines.

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