MIPS presents a game changing threat to the CPU side of the mobile SoC world, but nobody wants to address it.
When asked at CES about the up-and-coming MIPS-powered Warrior CPU mobile platform due out later this year, Johan Lodenius, Chief Marketing Officer of MediaTek said something bizarre: “Imagination is a big partner of ours. We use MIPS processors in some of the WiFi products we offer. We use graphics processors from from Imagination.”
Lodenius isn’t wrong; on the surface that’s a fair breakdown of the relationship between the two companies. MIPS has been used in dozens of different devices in some form for years and Imagination’s PowerVR platform is a widely used GPU core. It would be easier to list the companies that use PowerVR in their products than the ones that don’t.
But the problem now for ARM vendors like MediaTek is Imagination is pushing MIPS to be something more than just the processor of choice for the embedded market. As VR-Zone reported last year, Imagination’s CEO Hossein Yassaie wants to take on the near-monopoly ARM has on the compute side of the SoC market.
“We didn’t acquire MIPS for the hell of it. You know, a hundred million dollars is a quite lot of money for an IP company to spend on a business,” he is quoted as saying. “We see this as a multi-year plan. Our goal is to have 25 percent of the processor market within five years in terms of design elements.”
One Imagination exec further elaborates on the strategy outlined by his boss by boasting that Imagination has the de-facto support of Google to shake things up in the mobile world.
“Google does not want Android to become ARMdroid,” Peter McGuinness, Imagination’s Director of Technology Marketing said to VR-Zone at CES in January.
McGuiness explained that adding a new processor type to the mobile ecosystem will not be the complicated affair for developers that some industry watchers believe. MIPS, like ARM, is a RISC platform. While some developers are already producing processor agnostic applications, for those who are not Imagination offers something called “MagicCode” a Low Level Virtual Machine compiler that would allow for the easy porting of apps.
When Imagination starts to leverage the versatility of its platform, and the existing connections it has within industry, things are going to become messy.
A complicated relationship
The process of Imagination acquiring hardware wins will no doubt be complicated for deal-makers and lawyers because of the incestuous-like relationships that exist within the SoC IP space. On one hand Imagination will brag about how everyone is a customer, and it no doubt wants to keep a harmonious relationship with these industry players, but on the other hand company executives can’t help but brag about how efficient a MIPS SoC will be on a mobile platform. For every comment made about how “every significant [player in the mobile space] is a customer of ours — even Qualcomm,” there are also comments such as, “the reason the industry needs MIPS is to ensure that the competition ensures the industry will innovate.”
It’s no secret that one of the reasons MIPS is only poised to take off now as an ARM-alternative is because of management problems brought on by its prior owners.
“Alot of MIPS problems in market penetration don’t have to do with the technology, but rather the [prior] management focus,” McGuiness said at CES. *“We’re very, very focused and we’ve got all the big customers ready in our hand.”
But there’s still the grand MIPS question on the table. For ARM vendors it’s, “how do you complete against MIPS;” for MIPS it’s “how do you compete against ARM?”. Though neither party at CES would lay out the definite answer to the MIPS question — instead sticking to the tired “they are a partner and customer line — McGuiness dropped a few hints as to what might come.
“You can expect we’ll be having this conversation with people we’re already selling graphics to, and people we’re already not selling graphics to,” he said.
Perhaps the Lodeniuses of the world should realize that they have a Trojan Horse making its way through the gates of their established ecosystems.
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