Imagination Technologies Acquires MIPS
- Thread starter Lazy8s
- Start date
Seems like the sequel isn't willing to last; CEVA inc. made a counter offer:
http://ceva-dsp.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=119&item=605
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=712
....now where's a popcorn smiley when you need it?
http://ceva-dsp.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=119&item=605
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=712
....now where's a popcorn smiley when you need it?
Frankly I wasn't even aware of CEVA's existence up until that bidding contest started. They seem to be quite successful with their IP portofolio from what I was able to read into, yet unless I've missed something else their marketing cap is somewhere in the $330Mio range. Up to that point continuing the bidding would be extremely dangerous for such a small company.
The same thing we do every night - Try to take over the world!
That is just to retaliate after ARM bought Falanx back in 2006
Hardly in the same realm. No one had ever heard of falanx. Had they even any IP in implementation ?
Laurent's smiley tells me he was joking.
Either way it might be too late now, but since the MBX days I was considering the acquisition of ARM and IMG a quite good idea. No idea if there would had been any legal obstacles, but my gut feeling tells me that none of the two sides were actually considering any of the kind.
As for MIPS and IMG I haven't a clue what the latter's real intentions are. In any case there are some parallels the way I see it between MIPS IP and IMG's own META IP (for which integration rate according to the latest interim results is higher than I would had expected) and there's always stuff like that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson amongst others.
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/29873-imagination’s-mips-move-costs-it-with-shareholders
Heh...nice coincidence.
Heh...nice coincidence.
Loongson gets a ton of hype but has shown little results. These days the Chinese market is already flooded with cheap ARM SoCs that have been improving a lot. In fact I'd say that they're already surpassing Loongson's current performance level, which is jarring when you look at the specs on paper but if you look deeper into their uarch it becomes clear that it's not very well balanced. They're about a million miles away from offering a performance competitive desktop x86 alternative so it's not like they'll get that market instead, and their attempt to mitigate this with x86 acceleration instructions is a wasted effort.
It's not like Loongson is some big secret either, or that IMG knows something about it that we don't, and it's ludicrous to think that the anxious shareholders had no idea about it. Surely it was mentioned in whatever internal briefing IMG gave on the deal.
It's not like Loongson is some big secret either, or that IMG knows something about it that we don't, and it's ludicrous to think that the anxious shareholders had no idea about it. Surely it was mentioned in whatever internal briefing IMG gave on the deal.
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.
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?
Politically ARM is based in UK while MIPS are from US.
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?
Politically ARM is based in UK while MIPS are from US.
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.
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:
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)
Similar threads
