MIPS owner and GPU designer Imagination Technologies has revealed a MIPS-based development board. Very similar in concept to the Raspberry Pi, which costs $25 and has shipped around 1.5 million units in its lifetime, Imagination’s Creator CI20 is the first such micro-PC to feature MIPS processing power – which is renowned as an ultra-low power technology.
The board’s footprint measures 90.2mm x 95.3mm, and centers around a JZ4780 SoC from Ingenic Semiconductor – a Chinese company founded in 2005 and based in Beijing, and an Imagination partner. The JZ4780 uses a dual core MIPS32 CPU, clocked at 1.3GHz and with 512KB of L2 cache, paired with one of Imagination’s PowerVR SGX540 GPUs.
In the CI20, the JZ4780’s CPU is clocked at 1.2GHz. The board has 8GB of flash storage, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, and a HDMI output that supports up to 2K resolutions (2048 x 1536 pixels) and supports 1080p video playback. In terms of connectivity, the board features a 10/100 Ethernet port, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, as well as 2 USB 2.0 ports.
On the software side of things, the board comes preloaded with Debian 7, with other Linux distributions (including Gentoo, Yocto, Angstrom and Arch) said to be available soon. Imagination also promises that Android 4.4 will be available for the platform by the end of the month. Supported video codecs include H.264, VP-8, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and RV9.
The board has initially only been made available to developers in the Imagination Community, and has already gone out of stock – likely due to being free of charge. But that tactic will pay dividends if developers turn their attention to MIPS. A $0 cost is a good way of enticing new developers into the fold, as well as retaining the goodwill of older developers. But the CI20’s main purpose in life is to act as the platform on which new software and hardware can be refined and released – which is good news for Imagination, as the MIPS chips in these new products equate to new revenue.
Imagination is now shipping somewhere north of 800 million MIPS cores a year, as the architecture tries to challenge the dominance of x86 and ARM. To this end, Imagination set up a MIPS working group. Called Prpl, the group includes Broadcom, Cavium, Ikanos, Lantiq and Qualcomm, and it hopes to establish a strong software base for the MIPS architecture. Imagination is also working with Oracle to port the Java Development Kit and Java Embedded to MIPS too, but the firm has yet to join Prpl.
With the upcoming Android L ready to embrace the MIPS technology more readily than previous versions, MIPS might lead something of a resurgence against the x86 and ARM architectures that have been slowly squeezing it out of the market – especially if it can beat ARM at its own game in low-power chips.