Did you know that hardware can be open-source?
Crucial technology leading the hardware part of the open-source movement is the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).
One of the companies working with the RISC-V ISA is MIPS.
In addition to having the advantage of being open-source, RISC-V is a “reduced instruction set computer” architecture, which means CPUs based on it typically use less power than the complex instruction set computer architecture used in desktop and server computers.
RISC-V chips are everywhere, and we don't notice them. They might be powering the fingerprint reader on your laptop or are a part of your car's electronics; they are even used in Nvidia GPUs.
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MIPS used to design CPUs based on its RISC architecture, but a few years ago, it switched to RISC-V. In March, the company announced a special portfolio of cores and subsystems called Atlas, focused on physical artificial intelligence.
We live in a time when every company wants to launch something “smart,” which is increasing the demand for artificial intelligence on the edge. This is where Atlas shines.
GlobalFoundries (GFS) announced in June that it will acquire MIPS, affirming the importance of the RISC-V ISA. I spoke with MIPS CEO Sameer Wasson to learn more about how this acquisition will affect MIPS and what differentiates its products from the competition.
Wasson is a semiconductor industry veteran who spent 18 years with Texas Instruments (TI), with his last position there being vice president, business unit manager, processors. He became MIPS CEO in 2023.
MIPS will accelerate the launch of new products
Wasson said that MIPS will accelerate its investments by joining a large public company. Rather than doing things serially, MIPS will start doing more things in parallel. The company should be able to release more products faster and scale its customer engagements.
He noted that MIPS will continue to operate as a standalone business, and while its customers will be able to use GlobalFoundries' manufacturing processes, they will not be limited to them.
MIPS' Atlas portfolio is backed by the Atlas Explorer, a software development and optimization platform, and the MIPS CEO shared why the Explorer is so important.
Wasson said MIPS historically handled hardware and software design separately. This can produce less-than-optimal outcomes.
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“Either you have too much hardware, you don't have the right hardware, or you have a long lead time before software productizes on proprietary architectures.”
“Atlas Explorer is our attempt to go break all of those problems, and it is a tool which allows customers to do hardware-software code design together. I don't think there is a tool out there which does that today in the way we are offering our customers to be able to do it.”
“I think it will enable customers to move faster, and competition is not doing that. There are aspects of these tools available, but no one's looking at it end-to-end holistically as we are trying to get to,” said Wasson.
Regarding whether MIPS had plans to design architectures beyond RISK-V and make consumer-grade chips, Wasson said he doesn't expect MIPS' roadmap to change.
“I think open architectures give customers the right balance of customization, ownership, preventing vendor lock in, all of the good things which we get. At the end of the day, it comes down to total cost of ownership. All of this requires a lot of software, and if we are all not doing proprietary stuff, that cost of ownership comes down. I don't see us moving away from RISC-V,” said Wasson.
MIPS' IP goes into many applications, including auto, industrial, aerospace, defense, consumer, data centers, and communications infrastructure.
Wasson doesn't see the company going after smartphones and PCs. However, MIPS will be very active in day-to-day consumer stuff outside smartphones and PCs.
“I think of dishwashers; they're going to get more intelligence, so you're going to need electronics in that. Think of house robots or consumer robotics. I think that's a huge area,” said Wasson.
Dishwashers already have sensors, but as the sensors get smarter, they will need more powerful CPU cores that support such smart sensors.
MIPS CEO says: “You have to get semiconductors out of this proprietary mindset”
Wasson shared his opinion and experience with proprietary architectures.
“I grew up building proprietary architecture devices. My previous career at Texas Instruments was a combination of TI's own [digital signal processors], ARM-based devices, and a bunch of proprietary stuff around it. I think we developed some really good technology, and we developed some very successful businesses around it.”
“But what we didn't develop was a large community of developers around it. Which is why if you think about it, the initial results were always good, but the sustainability of that was very challenging,” said Wasson.
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Open-source projects invite contributions and increase trust in the product.
Wasson added, “You have to get semiconductors out of this proprietary mindset. I think it's coming out already and putting it in the mainstream mindset so that people are not spending effort trying to create artificial moats around their technology. They're making it more accessible and available to the customer.”
AI bubble burst won't affect MIPS
Wasson explained that the AI opportunity accelerates the adoption of the kind of devices MIPS is building. But MIPS isn't building the next bubble.
“We are solving real problems which customers have today. This is not to wait for AI to get deployed and then we will sell. If you look at the Atlas Explorer reference design we've announced, it's something which is motor control. Motors are all over the place today,” said Wasson.
“We believe there is more to do as robotics comes in and motors become smarter, intelligent. AI plays a big role in that, but this is not about trying to say ‘Let's go create a problem and then solve it,'” concluded Wasson.
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