Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 12, 2013 6:50 pm wrote:
> Drazick (DrazickHellNo.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 11, 2013 3:27 am wrote:
> > Does "Power" architecture hold any advantage over ARM / MIPS?
> > How do they all compared (In their 64 Bit variants)?
>
> Playstation 2 was 300 MHz MIPS, Playstation 3 was 3.2 GHz PowerPC, ARM does not go that high even today.
> I have heard that most DVR's have a PowerPC in them, and maybe half of households have a DVR, bigger market
> than consoles. Your car also contains several PowerPC chips for engine control, even bigger market.
>
> The worst design (x86) has the highest performance, so it is all a matter of what is available at
> what price, and does the design specs you need exist. ARM is cheap but there are no high end designs
> and the FPU used to suck, MIPS dropped the ball big time and fell behind, PowerPC owns the performance
> end of embedded and with Motorola (Freescale) designs scale down to quite low end markets.
>
> Both ARM and PowerPC sold architecture licenses, while MIPS sued cloners.
> Lots of ARM and PowerPC choices, few MIPS choices.
> ARM and PowerPC have lots of cool instructions that programmers like, MIPS
> is boring and only now added compact variable width instructions.
>
> POWER is trivially different from PowerPC, different marketing
> label for workstation/server class performance and cost/price.
>
> 64 bit ARM is still vaporware, and is completely different than 32 bit ARM, looks
> a lot like POWER. (or MIPS? I do not have an instruction set manual for it yet.
> Just know that all the important ARM parts like predication are gone.)
>

MIPS have recently updated their 32-bit licensable cores (aka Aptiv) and they go up to to A15 type performance (proAptiv) and they come with SMT as standard in the ISA unlike ARM. They are also about to introduce a new 64-bit licensable core called Warrior ...

http://withimagination.imgtec.com/index.php/mips-processors/mips-series5-warrior-cpu-cores-the-next-revolution-in-cpu-ip

They are also the market leader in network comms chips where throughput is King. This bespoke 28nm 20-core quad-thread quad-issue 8-way Broadcom XLP900 chip just broke through the 1 Trillion OPS/Sec barrier.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/broadcom-launches-worlds-highest-performance-multi-core-communications-processors-211172921.html

It's pretty fortunate for Intel that it is only fighting a toy Risc like ARM rather than one that has years of heavy duty 64-bit server heritage behind it ;-).