In December of last year, Wave Computing, which acquired the developments and patents of MIPS Technologies after the bankruptcy of Imagination Technologies, announced its intention to make the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS instruction set, tools, and architecture open and free of licensing fees. Access to the development packages was promised by Wave Computing for the first quarter of 2019. And they made it! This week, links to the MIPS R6 architecture/cores and accompanying tools and modules appeared on the MIPS Open website. Everything can be downloaded and used at your discretion without any payment required. The company will continue to release new cores in the open domain moving forward.
The first packages for free download include the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Release 6, MIPS SIMD extensions, MIPS DSP extensions, MIPS Multi-Threading support, MIPS MCU, microMIPS compression codes, and MIPS Virtualization. MIPS Open also includes the elements necessary for designing MIPS cores independently — these are MIPS Open Tools and MIPS Open FPGA.
The MIPS Open Tools component covers an integrated development environment for embedded systems with real-time operating systems and products for embedded systems running Linux. It will enable developers to build, debug, and deploy custom projects as hardware-software platforms for running applications. The MIPS Open FPGA component is a training program (environment) for those wanting to deepen their knowledge in the subject (architecture). Initially, MIPS Open FPGA was designed for students and supported by comprehensive reference materials on MIPS processors.
As a bonus, the MIPS Open FPGA package includes RTL code for future MIPS microAptiv cores. These cores will be announced later this year and provided as examples for non-commercial familiarization with future products. They will be small, energy-efficient computing cores, with their release expected in a few weeks.
Source: 3dnews.ru
