Last December, Wave Computing, which took over MIPS Technologies designs and patents following the bankruptcy of Imagination Technologies, announced its intention to make the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS instruction set, tools, and architecture open and royalty-free. Wave Computing promised to provide access to packages for developers during the first quarter of 2019. And they did it! At the end of this week, links to the MIPS R6 architecture/kernels and related tools and modules appeared on the MIPS Open site. Everything can be downloaded and used at your discretion and you will not have to pay for it. In the future, the company will continue to release new kernels to the public.
The first free download packages include MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Release 32 64-bit and 6-bit instructions, MIPS SIMD extensions, MIPS DSP extensions, MIPS Multi-Threading support, MIPS MCU, microMIPS compression code, and MIPS Virtualization. Also included in MIPS Open are the elements necessary to design MIPS cores on your own - these are MIPS Open Tools and MIPS Open FPGA.
The MIPS Open Tools element covers an integrated environment for developing embedded systems for real-time operating systems and products for embedded systems running Linux. It will allow the developer to build, debug and deploy an individual project as a hardware-software platform to run applications. The MIPS Open FPGA element is a tutorial (environment) for those who want to deepen their knowledge of the subject (architecture). MIPS Open FPGA was originally designed for students and supported by comprehensive MIPS processor reference materials.
As a bonus, the MIPS Open FPGA package comes with RTL code for future MIPS microAptiv cores. These cores will be announced later this year and provided as a non-commercial reference for future products. These will be small energy-efficient computing cores, which are expected to be released in a few weeks.
Source: 3dnews.ru