MIPS Creator CI20 development board now available for $65 | Hacker News Reader

MIPS Creator CI20 development board now available for $65

blog.imgtec.com

48 pointsalexvoica42 comments

Sorry, but I'm incredibly wary of anything Linux related from Img, particularly drivers. Poulsbo was a fiasco, and the situation has not improved significantly since. (And it's not just Linux. Intel had to delay the N2800 and related CPUs for several quarters because Img struggled to deliver stable Windows drivers.)

The same can be said about a lot of embedded projects. The fact is they all have custom hardware, which require custom drivers, etc.

... and the number of people who can write that kind of code -- low-level driver code -- is pretty small.

Why do all these boards have 100mbps Ethernet?

Because it's cheap?

Because it's lower power.

gigabit ethernet is a PITA to put on a PCB, and the applications running on them rarely require the extra speed.

We wanted a balanced feature set; things like USB 3.0 or Gigabit Ethernet can upset the low power mojo of a design.

The UK store only offers credit card as payment option. Not in all EU countries owning a credit card is common (I don't). So please offer a kind of payment that is common in the EU (for me: Germany) (say, direct debit (in German: Lastschrift) or at least SEPA credit transfer). Paypal, for example, offers direct debit.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

What is the story around linux drivers for the GPU?

Horrendous - PowerVR is one of the worst companies wrt open source. You do get OpenGL ES 2.0 blobs, though.

Who has the best support when it comes to gfx?

Open source graphics? Intel (they actually have an open source driver team), then AMD (they at least provide decent hardware documentation), then pretty much everyone else ships binary blobs and doesn't document anything.

Big parts of the VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi) are documented - though not completely (especially the video acceleration unit is not yet publicly documented, officially for the reason that you have to pay license fees for some video codecs):

http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/

From the embedded GPUs VideoCore IV is as far as I know thus the most open (but rather the one-eyed among the blind).

The kernel part is open while the user space is in binary blob form.

But is it available without publicly without signing an NDA / jumping through hoops? Would love to get this working on as a small debian box.

Everything should be on https://github.com/mips. Please have a quick look and tell me if there is something missing that you'd like to see.

Why the choice to go with a locked down GPU? Apart from openness concerns what about people who don't want to use Linux? Folks who write their own OS or use it bare-metal? This is a real downside to the RPi right now.

I've been wanting to do stuff with MIPS instead of ARM, but this board won't be it.

Any plans to make the hardware open? Or at least the gerber / board files. This could be useful for commercial applications.

There are schematics available at http://elinux.org/CI20_Hardware/Documentation

Is that enough?

Sorry if this is detailed somewhere on the site... but does it run from the mainline Linux kernel? Or do you need additional patches and/or binary blobs?

We have documented our progress on eLinux http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20.

http://elinux.org/CI20_upstream is probably the place to start.

I was hoping you would go with a MIPS64 architecture rather than the MIPS32 as 'leap' over the current bunch. Also no SATA? Network storage is ok but local SATA for an SSD would be nice.

We wanted a general purpose platform at a decent price and the SoC from Ingenic offered that - and more.

Fair enough, the Pi killer is a dual core 64 bit SoC with a GB ethernet port, a SATA port, a 1080p/60 capable GPU, and support for 2 - 8GB of DDR4 memory. That is like the 21st century set top box thingy, and possibly throw around computer. At a MSRP of < $50 (which makes it killer) (PSU, case, ssd, monitor etc all extra of course).

This is the first board in a series of many. We have some very exciting things planned for the future.

Any rough eta on some of the other boards?

Next year.

It's still 32 bit, only has 1GB RAM and it's $91 at Digikey, but the Olinuxino A20, from Olimex seems to meet just about all of your other criteria.

I've only used the A10, which is $42, but single core, no flash, no analog audio jacks, and for some maddening/expensive reason, 0.05" headers, instead of the 0.1" on the A20.

It's a little behind the bleeding edge of Linux (still at 3.4), but I've been able to port an app from a beaglebone black to this with virtually no headaches. In fact, it's been nice, since there is no device tree at 3.4. Best of all, it's readily available, unlike the BBB.

I am guessing that there is an Intel ATOM processor that is going to land into this space imminently. But they have let me down in the past :-)

Are there any good web pages or resources that offer a good high level overview of the differences between MIPS and ARM architectures generally?

Not really - and if they are, they are usually biased. You can try this: http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/courses/ece2035/readings/...

It's a pretty standard RISC about halfway between SH4 and ARM in RISCiness(TM).

It's memory map is a little different. (For MIPS32 at least, not sure what KSEG of MIPS64 looks like) 80000000-9FFFFFFF is fixed to a cached view of the first 512MB of physical memory. A0000000-BFFFFFFF is fixed to an uncached view. Everything else is only accessible by mapping it via the MMU (both from a physical and virtual context). Last I played with MIPS cores, they were only soft fill TLBs, but maybe that's changed. Thumb2 is more expressive than MIPS16 IMO (but that's just, like, my opinion, man).

Other than that, the microarchitectual differences between individual implementations greatly outweigh the influence of the ISA, but for an in order design at least you can probably make a MIPS that'll compete well with an ARM for less transistors.

ARM has that inline shifter and predicated instructions, both of which were removed in arm64. Those are the most salient things.

Is OpenCL supported?

No, only OpenGL (ES).

I'm still surprised no company released a rpi A+ competitor using a simpler SoC (without the GPU running a rt kernel to drive USB to drive piggybacking eth link)

Is ETAG some sort of JTAG variant? If yes, does OpenOCD have support for this ETAG interface?

It is a type of connector for MIPS debug probes. Probably the best place to ask for more info is http://forum.imgtec.com/categories/creator

How does this compare/contrast w/ (eg) Raspberry Pi or similar ?

Here is quick breakdown:

Newer/faster processor: 1.2 GHz dual-core MIPS32 vs. 700 MHz single-core ARMV6 More memory: 1 GB DDR3 vs. 512 MB DDR2 More storage options: 4 GB of flash + SD card expansion vs. microSD expansion Better connectivity: Ethernet + Wi-Fi + Bluetooth vs. Ethernet-only Wider operating system support: Linux + Android vs. Linux only.

I've ran some Linux/Android benchmarks on it and will publish the results in an article soon.

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