Wednesday, April 18th 2012
AMD and Google in Race to Buy Out MIPS
AMD and Google are locked in a race to buy out MIPS, an application processor architecture designer competitive to ARM. AMD comes from a decades old presence in the microprocessor industry, while Google is a satrap with smartphones, tablets, and other mobile computing devices thanks to its Android operating system. With Microsoft opening up to ARM architecture with Windows 8 RT, it is in Google's interests to hedge its bets on an alternative machine architecture to both x86 and ARM. The easiest way to that is buying out MIPS and funding development of powerful processors based on it. For AMD, it's a bid to stay competitive in the low-power processor market as Intel began making inroads to smartphone processor market.
Sources:
Bright Side of News, X-bit Labs
33 Comments on AMD and Google in Race to Buy Out MIPS
^Is this still active? If so why do they need to buy MIPS?!
Other than that, maybe for a permanent hold on it?
So literally, the old AMD couldn't do this, but former ATI side of AMD can.
thus why so sudden interest in 'almost dead' processor architecture?
Simple with the money that come from united arab emirates (the guys with MORE oil in back yard)
simple search with google.... amd emirates and will see the 8.1 % oil that run in AMD veins :)
AMD recenly acquired a low-power server manufacturer. Low power architecture, that ahs been used in server/workstation environment since 2 decades ago, could easily be making a comeback via this acquisition. AMD also has experience with smaller production nodes and MIPS needs to be scaled down in order to be even more competitive. On top of that AMD has been losing good engineers en-masse as of lately so new blood could resuscitate its x86 CPU department as well.
As far as Google is concerned: MIPS is valued at well under 1 billion USD at the moment and Google ahs 50 billion USD in its piggy. Why not use it for prospective acquisitions today (when MIPS is making its entry into mobile market, in addition to the networking appliance market it has been relegated to since the collapse of SGI business) rather than later when its price soars skyhigh ?
If I had $700M to spare I'd be seriously considering MIPS as well, I believe they will be one of the bright stars of computer industry in the next few years :)
moreover, android apps are architecture agnostic and also run on mips as long as its running android. Unless the app runs some ARM assembly code (most 3D games and 3D apps), it will run perfectly fine on mips
The ainol novo tablet is one example of a mips powered android device.
Possibility 2. AMD wins out, Google rages, buys AMD and then fires anyone involved with the MIPS deal.
*grabs popcorn.
to me was 'almost dead' because you have: PC - x86; mobiles - ARM; higher end embedded: mainly PPC & ARM (don't count the lowends like 8/16bits, DSPs;
but indeed I forgot the old-timers media and network processors... :)
the hell, in the previous company where I worked , we even considered au1100 as main candidate for our device-in-mind (that was like 8-9 years ago)...
Heck, most people probably don't realize that Windows (NT, the starter of the Win2K/XP/Vista/7/8 branch) once ran on MIPS as well. Since Microsoft seems to be going architecture-agnostic as well there is no reason why they couldn't make a MIPS port of Windows 8 and its successors as well if market shares change enough to make this a profitable decision. This would instantly make MIPS products much more appealing to the masses.
We the consumer need AMD to win the bid, unless you want to be stuck with the same technology for years as the most cost effective is also the most mediocre. It sounds wrong to not have cheaper devices, but the end effect is a loss of innovation.
What race!!