By Gideon Intrater, Vice President of Marketing

As a native Israeli now living in the Silicon Valley, I always look forward to the opportunity to travel home. Besides being born in Israel, I spent the first 12 years of my career there and have many friends in the Israeli semiconductor industry.

This month I will travel to Israel to speak at the MIPS Technical Seminar on May 14, an annual seminar hosted by MIPS since 2002. Israel is an extremely important region for MIPS, home to some of our key customers—including Altair, Amimon and Mobileye.  At the MIPS Technical Seminar, which was organized by MIPS’ Israeli Account Director Mauro Diamant, we will provide an update on MIPS, discuss our new Aptiv Generation product line, provide an ecosystem update including the exciting news about MIPS’ inclusion in Version 8 of Google’s NDK, and conclude with an introduction to virtualization-based security. Other speakers at the seminar will include Larry Hudepohl, MIPS’ Vice-President of Hardware Engineering, Amit Rohatgi, Principal Mobile Architect and Eyal Barzilay, Applications & Benchmarking Manager.

Mauro tells me that we already have more than two hundred registered participants!

The Israeli semiconductor industry is in a state of transition, primarily due to a recent wave of acquisitions.  Broadcom and PMC-Sierra have made numerous Israeli acquisitions, while Apple and CSR have followed suit with acquisitions including Anobit and Zoran.  A number of start-ups which MIPS partnered with since their inception had their “exit” through such acquisitions.  It will be interesting and exciting to see how these acquisitions translate into potentially shifting market share and new end products in the coming months and years.

Throughout the years, MIPS has had close relationships with many Israeli start-ups that went on to be acquired.  In 1999 we started working closely with Libit and Metalink which were later acquired by TI and Lantiq. Over time, many other companies went through a similar process: Savan (Lantiq), Galileo (Marvell), Octalica (Broadcom), Percello (Broadcom), Wintegra (PMC), Broadlight (Broadcom) and others.

We love working with Israeli start-ups. Time and again, we have seen these feisty young companies push the boundaries, create cutting edge technology, and in so doing, push us to stretch the limits of our microprocessor cores resulting in unique, out-of-the-box, higher-performing products. MIPS engineers get involved early in the designs, and stay closely connected to ensure a successful outcome.  In my opinion, we give start-ups an edge by the fact that we are ready to try new ideas and exercise the cores in unique ways.   Because of this, I believe there is a special bond between MIPS and the Israeli start-ups with whom we have collaborated.

If you will be in Israel on May 14, please come to learn more about MIPS and our important Israeli partners. As usual, the seminar will also include a MIPS Partners Expo, where a select group of MIPS partners will present their products, their cooperation with MIPS, and live MIPS-Based demos of their products and activities. Among the participating partners are Avnet ASIC, Arteris, Ashling, Carbon Design, Discretix, eSilicon, ESL, Imperas, Alon Tech/Mentor Embedded, Open-Silicon, Pertech/ThreadX, Sightsys, Sonics, SYSGO, Vivante and more.

Visit http://www.mips.com/israel_seminar2012/ and register for our May 14th seminar.  See you all there!

By Amit Rohatgi, Principal Mobile Architect, MIPS Technologies

Each year, Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona delivers not only the latest in mobile technology, but a carnival-like atmosphere—flashy announcements, colorful displays and elaborate fanfare. The show’s gaudiness is matched only by the Catalan capital itself. But if you remove all the hoopla, the vast majority of attendees have a common goal. Just about everyone is looking for ways to lure the developer, because it’s all about the apps!

When people talk about the mysterious concept called “the ecosystem,” it is the developer community that is being addressed. Whether it’s apps, middleware, connectivity, or games – the name of the game is content. After all, what good is a device if there’s nothing to do with it?

So how do you get engineers to develop apps for your platform? Simple, if you build the hardware, they will come!

Exactly one year ago, at MWC 2011, MIPS had just shown the first MIPS-Based mobile devices and as such, we were relatively unknown to developers. I had to work overtime to arrange meetings and then ports of apps to the MIPS architecture. This year the tides had turned. I arrived at MWC with the world’s first Android 4.0 tablet, at a sub-$100 price point. We had built a competitive mobile device running the latest version of Android, received tons of press, and sure enough the developers came! More than 50 percent of my meetings this year were with developers, many of whom approached us, wanting to bring their content to MIPS-Based devices!

Nobody wants to be the first to join a club, but everyone wants in once it becomes popular, and this was the story for MIPS at MWC 2012.

In the months leading up to MWC, our ecosystem grew in spades. We  announced partnerships with Gameloft (the leader in mobile gaming), Opera (the leader in optimized browser and HTML5 technologies bringing the latest Opera Mobile 12 to MIPS), Xamarin (a leader in promoting cross platform frameworks for developers bringing full Mono support for MIPS, Android and Linux), SAI Technology (promoting LTE middleware accelerated by MIPS unique multi-threaded solutions), Intrinsic ID (promoting a novel security architecture for protecting content delivery to MIPS-Based end-devices), and Altair Semiconductor (a leader in LTE solutions based on MIPS – working with our customer Ingenic to create low-cost LTE Android tablets). We also announced the world’s first Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” tablet in December 2011, as well as an Android 4.0 tablet for the Indonesian market.

At MIPS, we are very proud of our achievement being first to market with an Android 4.0 tablet. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Ingenic Semiconductor and launched Android 4.0 on MIPS within three weeks of it going open source. Even Andy Rubin (Senior VP for Android at Google) lauded the achievement publicly – citing a true testament of the openness of Android (and MIPS is at the cornerstone of proving it!) Like most new hardware devices, this MIPS-Based tablet was something of a leap of faith. We did not have advance commitments from ecosystem partners to develop apps, rather faith that if we built the device, the apps would follow. Our prediction came true.

The reason why Intel has yet to achieve widespread developer attention in the mobile space thus far is they have not delivered hardware for mobile. We expect to this to change in the coming months of course – and welcome it to enrich the overall ecosystem even further.

Of course, hardware must be of a certain quality to attract developers. There are a lot of Shanzai brands and devices out there – what makes the MIPS-Based Android 4.0 tablets different? Well for starters, they are based on the legendary, efficient MIPS architecture, which translates into good performance and very strong battery life. According to John Oram of Bright Side of News, who ran some benchmarks and tested the battery life , “Our estimation is the MIPS-Ingenic Ainol NOVO Basic 7 tablet is superior to the ARM A8 powered platforms. It is equal or superior to the ARM A9, single-core platforms.”

Secondly, there is the not-so-small matter of price/performance. Performance is undoubtedly important, but what drives adoption at the end of the day is affordability. Of course, devices must be fast, have apps and connectivity,  but they absolutely must be attainable by the mass population. A US$600 tablet completely misses the mark in this regard. Let’s talk some proof points:

1. Mid last year, Hewlett Packard did a fire sale on a Snapdragon powered WebOS tablet for $99 that sold out within hours. WebOS (R.I.P.) did not have an ecosystem that could rival iOS or Android. Yet it sold millions within a matter of days.

2. In November, Amazon announced the Kindle Fire – a $200 device that was “good enough” for reading books, email, web browsing, game play etc. It too has sold millions.

3. In December, MIPS (along with its partners – Ingenic and Ainol) announced the world’s first Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) tablet – a sub $100 device – that delivered one-half the performance of the iPad at one-fifth the cost. According to Ainol, hundreds of thousands of units were sold in the first month alone.

4. In February, Speedup/MLW Telecom of Indonesia (along with Ingenic and MIPS) announced a fixed-wireless Android 4.0 tablet with prepaid connectivity for a promotional price of $33. It sold out within days.

With developers now courting MIPS as much as we are courting them, MIPS is perfectly positioned to further grow our ecosystem, whereby developers bring their content to MIPS-Based platforms. A steamroll effect can then take place. With more content, larger OEMs become interested. And as more MIPS-Based devices emerge, developers have more platforms to monetize their content. MIPS is in a very exciting place and we expect important new developments in the coming months. Stay tuned!

MIPS’ MT technology boosts performance 43 percent; combined MT & MC boosts performance 150 percent

By Eyal Barzilay, Applications and Benchmarking Manager

The use of multi-core technology to deliver more CPU horsepower is one of the increasingly common methods to providing higher system performance in hardware. This is true even for high volume consumer applications where cost and power can be very important. However, upgrading to a multi-core system doesn’t automatically guarantee performance improvements or an enhanced user experience. It’s not just a hardware problem – software must be written in a way that can make use of parallel hardware resources. But software is adapting – systems are getting much more complex, such that multiple processes and threads are running simultaneously in many cases, and applications are being written to take better advantage of multiprocessing hardware trends.

With that in mind, we recently used the BrowsingBench™ benchmark from EEMBC to evaluate the performance benefits of MIPS’ multi-core (MC) and multi-threading (MT) technologies. Our objective was to find out how these technologies enhance the user experience of a very popular and very real consumer application – web browsing on the Android™ software platform.

BrowsingBench is a credible and widely used tool that is trusted and cited by leading technology companies. It measures web page loading and rendering time for a large set of web pages with diverse content, and it does this in a reliable way which leads to repeatable and meaningful results. It will run on any connected device with a web browser. And rather than performing a synthetic test, BrowsingBench performs the same operations which a human would perform on the device. We’ve used several other benchmarks in the past that were suitable for evaluating MC/MT system performance; however none represented the real-world user experience on connected devices as well as BrowsingBench.

We ran BrowsingBench on a system based on the MIPS32® 1004K™ Coherent Processing System (CPS). In its maximum implementation, the 1004K CPS can support up to four cores and two hardware threads (also known as Virtual Processing Elements or VPEs) per core. To keep things simple for this test however, the configuration we used was dual core with two VPEs per core, for a total of 4 VPEs. VPEs are essentially logical CPUs that share one physical pipeline in each 1004K core, based on MIPS’ multi-threading technology.

The software platform running on our system was Android, and the web browser we used was the Android browser which comes with every Android-based system.

To evaluate the benefits of multiple cores and VPEs on web browser performance, we ran BrowsingBench using the 4 different configurations listed in the table below. In all cases, the tests were executed on the same dual-core 1004K system; however we used the operating system to enable and disable cores and VPEs.

The big question we wanted to answer was whether Android would be able to take advantage of these multiple processing resources to load and render web pages faster, thereby enhancing the user experience. To do that, Android would have to use parallel processes and threads while executing the browsing workload.
The results, which are shown in the table and chart below, leave no doubt: Android based web browsing performance is greatly enhanced by MC and MT technologies.

The main observation is that browsing performance improves more than 2.5x when comparing the full configuration to the basic configuration. With a great deal of parallel execution under Android, the browser can truly benefit from the combination of MT and MC. A closer look at what’s happening under the hood in the Android system indeed shows that a lot of processes are running in parallel. The two main processes in the system are the Android Browser itself and another process called “system server,” which manages many components of Android including the display system, and is kept very busy during the BrowsingBench run.

Even if we limit the system to a single core, the MIPS MT technology gives us a BrowsingBench performance boost of 43 percent. One of the primary attributes of MT is to improve performance efficiency of a core, which it does by increasing the pipeline utilization of that core when multiple processes and/or threads are running. So for systems where silicon real estate is at a premium, choosing a multithreaded core can be a great way to boost system performance.

When multi-core and multi-threading systems were first introduced into the marketplace, most existing software was not optimized to make good use of these technologies. Today this is changing. Android is a complex software platform, and a perfect example of a high volume consumer platform that is quickly evolving and being optimized for optimal user experience in a Web-connected world.

At MIPS we are very pleased with the benchmark results because they demonstrate that our MC and MT technologies deliver much higher performance than the standard hardware used only a few years ago, and make a significant impact to end users of many connected devices from smart phones and tablets to connected DTVs.

MIPS Moves Quickly with Android 4.0.3 and LLVM

Android 4.0.3 came out from Google on Friday December 16th and who could resist the challenge? So, MIPS engineers picked up the release from the Google source tree and ported it to MIPS within 24 hours. In fact, they decided to push through the weekend and bring 4.0.3 up on the Ingenic/Ainol tablet. Thus we were able to give Ainol a head start towards an over the air (OTA) upgrade for tablets sold to-date plus schedule a switch over to 4.0.3 for new tablets.

But there is more here than just our dedication to supporting MIPS’ licensees and the Android community …

Android 4.0 expands on Google’s use of LLVM, and MIPS completely supports this initiative – in fact, when Google adopted LLVM 3.0 as the basis of Renderscript in Android 4.0.3, MIPS support was already available. So, what is LLVM, and why is it important for the Android community?

LLVM – Low Level Virtual Machine – is an umbrella for modular compiler technologies. It includes a C/C++ compiler front-end, a portable code generator supporting a wide variety of architectures, an aggressive optimizer, and an efficient just-in-time (JIT) compiler on the back-end. Renderscript, the first technology in Android to use LLVM, first became popular in HoneyComb (Android 3.0)–as a set of low-level APIs targeting 3D rendering and compute operations. In fact Renderscript is an example of using the  high-performance APIs provided by LLVM to achieve the same level of system performance that developers could expect were they instead to  use native code on the underlying device. But unlike the existing Android native development kit (NDK), this solution is cross-platform – meaning that applications built using this technology can run on several architectures supported by LLVM.

The inclusion of MIPS optimizations for LLVM in Google’s Android 4.0.3 release takes a great step in making LLVM available for more general use by app developers seeking to exploit native processor performance and capabilities while retaining complete portability in the Android universe.

So what’s behind this LLVM push for Android?

MIPS actually became involved in the industry’s LLVM initiative over a year ago – before it became generally available in Android. This was when MIPS’ compiler group realized that LLVM was going to be a major basis for applications in the future. LLVM had already been the basis of Apple’s application environment for the iPhone and iPad. Our engineers felt that it was only a matter of time before it became the basis of application development environments in the wider market.

We were clearly not alone in our thinking, and so LLVM first appeared in Android.

By supplying our LLVM technology for the MIPS architecture to Google, we have enabled all MIPS licensees, their OEMs and application developers targeting their platforms to have access to the best possible execution environment on MIPS-based platforms, starting with Android 4.0.3. Of course, as Android moves forward, MIPS will make further refinements to LLVM on the MIPS architecture available to Google. We will also make available other optimizations and software related to improving Android’s “out of the box” support for the MIPS architecture.

Android has become an enormous force in the consumer electronics market – a market in which MIPS’ legendary performance, power efficiency and cost effectiveness have been well recognized. The MIPS architecture has already been adopted widely on just about every type of consumer device … cell phones, tablets, set-top boxes, and digital TVs to name a few.

The inclusion of support for the MIPS architecture directly in this latest key facility of Android provides an even more attractive future for all of our licensees and their customers – and ultimately for the end users who continually seek out the best price/performance products available in the market and rely on those products in their day to day lives.

MIPS is moving forward with Android – as always, we are focused on going beyond simply what the market is demanding. We know that providing an enriched apps development environment benefits all end users. More apps, anywhere and any time, running on Android, running on MIPS!