LAS VEGAS—Chip company MIPS has been quietly sitting in WD and Roku set-top boxes and Vizio TVs for years. They're finally making a move into smartphones, and I checked out one of their first devices. Combined with Android, MIPS chips have the potential to deliver smartphones well under $100, even without a new contract.
MIPS has been around for decades, just not as an applications processor for smartphones. Almost all smartphones today run on processors using the competing ARM architecture. MIPS powers Velocity Micro's Cruz tablet, though.
The company makes an architecture for small processors that seem to work best in multi-core environments. For a while, they were essentially frozen out of the smartphone market because top OSes didn't support them, MIPS CEO Sandeep Vij said. But Android has changed that—Android runs fine on MIPS, so they're ready to get back in the game.
Android's Dalvik virtual machine interprets code for a range of different chips, so third-party app developers won't have to write different programs for ARM and MIPS devices, MIPS strategic marketing director Kevin Kitagawa said. That was a big problem in the early days of Windows CE, when users had to know whether they had an ARM or MIPS-based PDA. It's not an issue any more, Kitagawa said.
A MIPS chip can fit three multi-threaded cores into roughly the same physical space and power consumption level as two ARM cores, enabling up to 80% faster performance in the same physical area, MIPS strategic marketing director Kevin Kitagawa said.
Another advantage is that MIPS keeps scaling up power while using the same instruction set, much like Intel does with its X86 chips, Kitagawa said. ARM makes changes to its instruction set with each new generation of chips. That could make MIPS easier to program for.
So I was intrigued when I grabbed the Chinese-made MIPS smartphone. Running Android 2.1 "Éclair," it looked and felt just like a standard low-end, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone. It was usable, but animations were jerky on the 320x480 screen, and playing games was a bit of a problem. It wasn't a performance standout.
Then MIPS told me that it was running on a chip that's the equivalent of a 400Mhz ARM9, using MIPS's architecture, with a huge, cheap 130nm process. That's big news. It means MIPS could enable entry-level smartphones for well under $100, which could lead Android-based smartphones to really start replacing feature phones in the market, Kitagawa said.
The MIPS phone I saw was low-end, but the slides the company showed me told another story. MIPS chips can compete with the new ARM Cortex-A9s in chipsets like NVIDIA's Tegra 2 to power Android Honeycomb-based tablets with potentially better performance, Kitagawa said.
So where might we see MIPS processors in future phones? The company has relationships with Motorola and TI already, but that's all about networking equipment. The handhelds they showed at CES were all no-name Chinese devices. But I think they may have a chance to be in future BlackBerries.
Here's why: MIPS already works with QNX, the new BlackBerry OS found in the PlayBook and future RIM phones. RIM is used to mixing up its chip suppliers. MIPS says it delivers more speed in the same physical space as ARM chips, which also means it may be able to deliver the same speed with less power consumption—and power consumption is RIM's big bugaboo.
Will MIPS break through or will we continue to live in an ARM world? Keep your eyes open for announcements later this year.