Well it happens that most of the cheapest Tablets and Phone in China are actually based on MIPS SoC. Although i could not understand why MIPS SoC would be cheaper then ARM SoC given both charges very little and cost of license should be minimal.
The Chinese tablet and phone market right now is flooded with cheap ARM SoCs from many vendors like Allwinner, Chinachip, Rockchip, and Amlogic. Even non-Chinese SoC vendors like Mediatek and Freescale are seeing their SoCs show up in products.
There is exactly one Chinese manufacturer of MIPS SoCs, Ingenic. They get some design wins but I get the impression they're rapidly losing market share and definitely don't have anywhere close to a majority. They have an in-house core that's falling way behind the competition. They did well a few years ago when Chinese ARM SoCs were also way behind and still using ARM9, but these days they're using the same scalar in-order core only augmented with a higher clock speed and L2 cache to fight ARM SoCs which have moved ahead 2-3 generations. They're supposed to be bringing out a dual-issue (probably in-order) core but I don't see how they can keep up when they keep falling more and more behind and aren't cheaper than the cheapest ARM SoCs like from Allwinner.
And Why the Chinese Government wanted to use MIPS is totally beyond me. Wouldn't a Pure ARMv8, implementation, i.e excluding the other baggage and forgoes compatibility be just as good?
Loongson started a long time, long time ago, many years before ARMv8 was released (and surely the Chinese government wouldn't have had access to it). Being 64-bit is a big reason, but I think the biggest reason is that the MIPS base ISA they used is very simple and has a lot of instruction encoding room to add their own stuff, which they did.
They also didn't start actually paying licensing costs until well after products were shipping. MIPS may have been less vigilant in pursuing license violations from Chinese companies. ARM may have had more resources to pressure them.
Ailuros said:
Didn't MIPS have a 64bit architecture long before ARM or am I wrong?
Yeah, and that's of course a major factor for Loongson..
However, this has been brought up a lot before with regards to mobile competition, and here I think it's worth pointing out that MIPS hasn't until fairly recently started offering a 64-bit low power core for license (and of course no one else was making their own).
On the flip side, until
very recently MIPS had a major deficiency vs ARM (and x86, etc): no real SIMD. Loongson in particular implements their own, but it's only 64-bit and looks a lot like paired singles + MMX (seriously, their instruction mnemonics are lifted straight from MMX)