First MIPS 64 Bit Mobile Processor Revealed

Reportedly, Ingenic has just signed a license agreement with Vivante to pair up the former company’s power MIPS CPUs with the latter’s new efficient GPUs.

You’ll probably remember that late last year, the first Android 4 tablet was actually powered by a MIPS processor and not by an ARM one.

MIPS has been in the market of making powerful and efficient processors for a long time now. The company has much more experience with servers and workstations, while ARM has none whatsoever.

After leaving SGI because it had chosen Intel’s Itanium architecture (a move that led to the former company's bankruptcy), MIPS saw that the server market was mostly oriented towards x86 solutions, so they went back and concentrated on efficient, low-power architectures.

The most recent achievement of MIPS in the mobile business was the aforementioned launch of the first Android 4 tablet using an Ingenic MIPS processor.

Being first was not the only achievement. The price of just 99 USD has not yet been beaten by any other ARM based counterpart running Android 4.

As we’ve revealed in our previous articles, MIPS has long had a 64 Bit architecture and it is very experienced with it. MIPS had 64 Bit server CPUs back in 1991, while ARM is just licensing 64 Bit technology this year.

Ingenic has just announced that, for their next XBurst2 MIPS CPU they will use Vivante’s powerful GPU. The XBurst2 MIPS CPU promises to be a very powerful architecture that will run at 1.5 GHz.

The XBurst2 will be a 64 Bit MIPS CPU with a dual-issuse/dual-threaded design using the 40nm manufacturing process.

The Xburst2 will also be a very cool and low-power part, as Ingenic is building it on the 40 nm process, rather than on the 65 nm process that was used for the initial 1GHz Xburst MIPS CPU that was powering the first Android 4 tablet.

The XBurst2 architecture is due to be launched later this year.

Posted in: Hardware, Mobile Phone, Tablet