Suckers never die, they just exchange places with each other - A proberb
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Chinese licence MIPS
CHINESE BOFFINS, attempting to build their own chips to free the workers from their dependence on evil imperialist chips, have decided to splash out on a licence for the MIPS instruction set.
According to PC World, China's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) has licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures for development of its Godson chips and ended a row over its previously alleged unlicensed use.
The MIPS chip architecture, which is about as compatible with x86 technology as an Iphone is with an IBM mainframe, had always been destined for the Chinese chip. However MIPS got miffed when ICT started calling its Godson chips "MIPS-like" and used a modified version of the instruction set.
ICT decided to be a bit nicer after it teamed up with ST Microelectronics, a MIPS licensee, on worldwide Godson sales. China hopes that people from foreign parts will buy its chips and the cash will be a nice little earner of foreign revenue.
Now that it has a licence, ICT will be allowed to stick a "MIPS-compatible" label on its Godson chips. This also means that ICT will be able to support Google's Android platform, which MIPS Technologies said this month it had ported to its chip architecture. µ
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that made my morning... what a joke!
Not only is flash evil for cpu time, but until it became widely known, it was used by evil govts to turn on the camera's on notebooks for voyeurism.
Don't long for Flash support. We'd all be better off without it. It's way overused, uses heaps of CPU time, is mostly for ads and on top of it all - isn't needed. The javascript support in modern browsers (Not the old internet exploder) is more than fast enough. Flash support will only undo all the hard work the chip makers put into extending battery life.
A friend of mine has a MIPS netbook which afaik is based on one of these chips. It's a great little machine and is actually quite low power (so the batteries last for hours) but the only problem is the lack of Flash and video/audio codecs. Saying that if Adobe sort that out (or SWFDec or Gnash get up to the standard of Adobe Flash which I dare say will happen eventually) then I can see it making a nice little machine.
Although saying that, ARM may stop it in it's tracks.
Rob