|
Just two short years after MIPS Technologies announced its entrance into the mobile processor space, the company has made significant inroads with numerous MIPS-Based™ tablets and smartphones shipping and a growing mobile ecosystem around the MIPS® architecture. We'd like to share some of our recent successes.
Just this month, Philips — a household name in lifestyle electronics — released a MIPS-Based™ Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" entertainment tablet in China. Being the first MIPS-Based Android CTS (compatibility test suite) certified product in the world, it has reached a significant milestone in bringing Google Mobile Services to future devices. The tablet is powered by Ingenic Semiconductor's JZ4770 mobile applications processor, which leverages a MIPS-Based XBurst™ CPU running at a speed of up to 1.2GHz.
This success follows MIPS' release on Dec. 5, 2011 of the world's first Android 4.0 tablet, also based on Ingenic's processor and distributed by Chinese OEM Ainol Electronics. This tablet was available for sale just two weeks after Google released the latest version of Android. MIPS software engineers worked overtime during those two weeks to achieve the port of ICS and ensure a quality release. The result was an Android 4.0 tablet ahead of any other OEM worldwide.
The MIPS-Based Android 4.0 tablet from Ainol has made further history by setting a new standard at a sub-$100 price point. While there are other tablets at this price point, they generally have older technology such as resistive (versus multi-touch capacitive) touch screens, less memory, and they are running older versions of Android (e.g. Android 2.3). By contrast, the MIPS-Based sub-$100 tablet features Android 4.0, high performance and many of the capabilities of tablets costing from $200 to $600!
Other exciting developments were shared at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this February, including the facts that there have been millions of units shipped to-date by MIPS licensees for mobile user equipment.
We also announced a recent design win for multi-touch controllers and a partnership that will lead to the first tablets using MIPS processors for both baseband and applications processing. This builds on existing applications processing wins with Ingenic, Actions, Maxrise, MDV and others; baseband processing wins with customers including Altair and Sequans; and a growing presence with OEMs and carriers.
The MIPS display cabinet at MWC included the world's first Android 4.0 tablet, an Android 4.0 smartphone, numerous brands of smartphones and other mobile devices-as well as a wide variety of mobile networking equipment including Wi-Fi routers, residential gateways and LTE base stations.
The display was significant considering that only two years earlier MIPS exhibited for the first time at MWC, announcing its first mobile design wins and the intention to enter the segment for mobile devices. In 2011, we returned to MWC with the first MIPS-Based mobile devices and now in 2012, we upgraded to a larger suite to accommodate our robust display of wireless offerings and fully-booked calendar of partner meetings!
Our suite was not the only place to see MIPS at MWC. Throughout the exhibit halls, dozens of companies featured MIPS-Based mobile and cellular infrastructure products including such well-known companies as Broadcom, Altair, Qualcomm Atheros and Cavium.
MIPS Mobile Architect Amit Rohatgi says 2012 felt like a true turning point: "Last year I remember courting companies to make their applications MIPS-compatible, with the promise of more MIPS-Based handsets to come. This year, with dozens of handsets on display in our suite, we had to push out several meetings until a future date. We had companies lining up to tell us why their applications would be perfect for the MIPS architecture. We were booked solid the entire show."
Wireless and Mobile Infrastructure
MIPS has long held a leadership position in CPU technology that powers leading edge Wi-Fi routers, residential gateways and mobile infrastructure equipment from companies including Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, Sequans, Altair, Cavium, Lantiq and Ralink, a Mediatek Company. MIPS holds a leading share in WLAN infrastructure and a growing presence in 3G/4G baseband. At MWC, we were able to further build on our wireless infrastructure leadership by demonstrating the power and scalability benefits of MIPS multi-threading and multi-core technologies for mobile.
Multiple Entry Points into the Mobile Handset
High-end smartphones today often include five or more processors, including baseband processing, applications processing, media processing, connectivity (Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, NFC etc.) and multitouch controllers.
Each of these represents an opportunity for MIPS. At MWC, we were excited to announce that two of our licensees are joining forces to create the first mobile devices to feature MIPS architecture for both applications and baseband processing. Altair Semiconductor announced it will bring its MIPS-Based FourGee™ LTE chipset to MIPS-Based Android 4.0 tablets from Ingenic. Both Ingenic and Altair's products are based on the industry-standard MIPS® architecture.
The Importance of Emerging Markets
As the market continues to drive down the cost of Android tablets and smartphones, these products move towards worldwide mass adoption. MIPS is helping drive this movement by breaking the price/performance barrier for tablets with 1GHz performance at a sub-$100 price point. MIPS' performance-efficient products are "right-sized" for emerging markets. Because of the elegance and simplicity of the MIPS architecture, our cores can achieve the same performance at lower clock frequencies compared to the competition. Ultimately, this means that MIPS cores can be implemented with lower power in a smaller silicon die area, translating to longer battery life, lower cost, and increased affordability to the end user.
In addition, MIPS offers unique features such as multi-threading support and low latency. We also have the agility to move quickly in support of our customers, as demonstrated by our work with Ingenic to announce the world's first Android 4.0 tablet just two weeks after the code was available in open source.
Ecosystem Development
We recognize the importance of a broad ecosystem of third party support in easing time-to-market and providing comprehensive solutions for our customers. As such, we continue to grow the MIPS mobile ecosystem to provide integrated solutions including applications, operating systems, stacks/drivers, processor cores and platforms. Below are some of the ecosystem developments we announced at MWC:
Building a Secure Mobile SoC
MIPS Technologies is working with Intrinsic-ID and SYSGO to provide security solutions for MIPS-Based mobile platforms. The Intrinsic-ID collaboration allows MIPS licensees and OEMs to fortify their platforms with security-centric applications, such as media content protection, secure payment transactions and secure cloud storage. The SYSGO relationship allows multiple applications and operating systems to run securely in parallel on MIPS-Based platforms.
Mobile Browser Availability
Opera Software's Opera Mobile browser is the leading third-party browser on the Android platform and is now available for MIPS-Based Android tablets. The Opera browser demonstrates great HTML5 performance, with data compression up to 90 percent and fast page loading speed.
Mono for Android support coming to MIPS-Based Android 4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' devices
Xamarin's Mono for Android Application Development Platform added support for MIPS, giving six million C# and .NET developers worldwide the ability to develop apps for MIPS-Based Android 4.0 devices.
MIPS: The Credible Alternative for Mobile
Like all landscapes, the mobile industry only stands to benefit from alternatives, healthy competition and choice among processor architectures and cores. The mobile industry does not want to depend on a single incumbent architecture and it no longer has to.
Android has allowed MIPS to enter the mobile segment, and in just two short years, MIPS has made significant inroads. Customers looking for “right-sized” mobile processing solutions need look no further: MIPS is the credible alternative for mobile.
Click on some of the links below to find out what the media is saying about MIPS in mobile.
|
