MIPS Technologies believes its latest processor core has the performance to attack ARM’s Cortex-A8 core in the embedded market for both handhelds and set-top boxes.
The MIPS32 74K core is the company’s first fully synthesisable 32-bit processors to achieve operating frequencies greater than 1GHz.
This core is fabbed on TSMC’s 65nm GP process which gives it some of the performance gain.
But MIPS has also made design changes to boost performance. Even on a 90nm process the new core is 50 per cent up on the previous 24K core, according to Pete Del Vecchio, MIPS product marketing manager.
Introduced over a year ago, ARM’s Cortex-A8 processor, also fabbed on a 65nm process, is optimised for low power performance. While Del Vecchio claims the 74K has the architecture and pure speed performance to match and even surpass the ARM core in set-top box design, can it compete on power efficiency in the handheld market?
“With voltage scaling you can trade performance for power and we will also target it at the lower power process,” said Del Vecchio.
The 74K core’s microarchitecture features a 17-stage asymmetric limited dual-issue pipeline, which can individually optimise ALU and load/store instructions.
Out-of-order instruction dispatch enables the 74K core to execute multiple instructions more often than an in-order processor.
“This results in significantly improved efficiency even for existing binary code,” said Del Vecchio.