What’s in a number? MIPS jumps a generation to avoid bad luck
The processor IP company is current the focus of a bidding war between UK IP company Imagination Technologies and Israeli DSP IP vendor CEVA. It’s latest Release 5 of the architecture comes, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, directly after Release 3.
"Release 3 was what Aptiv was based on," said Mark Throndson, director of product marketing at MIPS. "4 is considered unlucky in our largest customer base in the Asia Pacific Rim," he said. "That’s all across China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea so we chose for marketing reasons not to focus on that number for this release."
MIPS has been led by its customers for the new release, which brings many of the popular developments such as virtualization, SIMD and DSP, the application specific extensions, or ASEs, into the base architecture so that they do not have to be licensed separately.
Companies with architecture licenses such as Broadcom, Cavium and Ingenic Semiconductor are working with Release 5 now, and MIPS will come up with its own core implementation, new owners permitting, next year.
www.MIPS.com
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