Actually, it’s rather amazing how rapidly SoC performance targets shift and how yesterday’s “high-end” performance is now today’s “mid-range.”

Take for example the targets for smartphones.  They have seen such a rapid rate of adoption that a nascent, but fast-growing market for entry-level smartphones has emerged.  These are the sub-$100 models that don’t have all the bells and whistles of the high-end phones but still need a decent amount of performance to support the more common features.  Several of the early low-cost smartphone models use single-core processors, but newer designs are targeting multi-core, whether they do only apps processing, baseband processing, or a combination of both.  Good midrange multi-core performance is desired, but given the high-volume and mobile aspects of these devices, low cost and low power are also heavily desired design goals.

Entry-level smartphones may be a good poster-child for the “Yin and Yang” application, but these are not the only devices that need area- and power-efficient mid-range multicore performance.  Driven by broadband, mobility and new applications, SoCs for SSD controllers, residential gateways, and automotive infotainment electronics have also shown an increase in performance requirements that require multi-core.  While these applications don’t necessarily demand the highest levels of performance, they still need very good mid-range capabilities.  And getting just the right mix of power and performance can often be more challenging than designing something just based on performance alone, given the tight design constraints.

We are excited about MIPS’ new interAptiv family of multi-threaded, multiprocessor CPUs because it delivers the efficient mid-range, multi-core performance needed in a variety of embedded devices, while simultaneously offering low power and low cost.  It’s ideal for the aforementioned applications and others with similar profiles.  With the interAptiv cores, this efficiency comes largely from the use of multi-threading, which really shows its value when applications are highly parallel and subject to pipeline stalls from long memory accesses.  The net result with interAptiv cores is that designs can realize the highest levels of performance on a per-unit area and per-unit power basis.  From this standpoint, interAptiv cores run circles around competitive cores in the same class.  Factor in the multi-core support provided with interAptiv, and this means now you have a highly SCALABLE and efficient multi-processing platform.

One of the key improvements in interAptiv cores over previous generations of MIPS’ multi-threaded cores is in the multi-core performance.  As I said earlier, more and more mid-range designs are going multi-core, so making sure the block that connects the cores together has good performance is suddenly at the forefront.  The interAptiv core uses MIPS’ 2^nd generation coherence manager (CM) with integrated L2 cache.  With the integration of the L2 cache and other improvements, the CM delivers significantly improved latencies and better system throughput.

Power management also got a boost in the interAptiv cores, with intelligent way selection in L1 ICACHE, ability to do 32-bit accesses to the L1 DCACHE and DSPRAMs, and the ability to turn off the core clock on outstanding bus requests.  This comes along with the other power management features found in our prior generation of multi-threaded/multi-core offerings, including cluster level power control, which provides voltage and clock gating on a per core basis.

And for those designers working on SoCs for applications requiring higher reliability, the interAptiv core offers ECC on L1 DCACHE and DSPRAM memories.  This is good for applications such as storage or driver assistance in automotive where data integrity may be a higher priority relative to other applications.

So while we can’t completely eliminate the balancing act of blending performance with power/cost efficiency, (sorry, there’s not yet a push button solution for that) we can surely make the process a lot easier with the interAptiv cores.  So learn how to balance your Yin and Yang with interAptiv cores today by going to the interAptiv product page on the MIPS website!

MIPS recently commissioned a survey to determine the top concerns among design engineers. The survey was performed by the independent technology marketing firm McClenahan Bruer Communications, which queried 110 engineers culled from a reputable, third-party database. The survey was one of the many pieces of supporting research for the May 10th launch of our new Aptiv™ Generation microprocessor cores.

The survey was kept very short, but covered several interesting topics that included multi-threading, multi-core, and sensitivity to power consumption. Responses confirmed that power consumption is a primary concern among design engineers, with 28% of respondents choosing this as their top concern, compared to 18% choosing the top concern of processor performance, and 18% choosing the top concern of raw processing power. Over three quarters of respondents reported feeling pressure to reduce power consumption without sacrificing performance; not surprisingly, nearly all surveyed indicated they would appreciate a new IP core that offered low power consumption without losing performance—who wouldn’t?

As the survey suggests, the demands of today’s applications are forcing design engineers to look for the holy grail of how to increase performance, while simultaneously reducing power. MIPS Technologies’ new Aptiv cores were designed to achieve top performance in their class – each achieves the highest published CoreMark/MHz score in their respective class – but delivers that performance very efficiently. The goal is to provide designers with a range of compelling options to satisfy this increasing challenge in their next designs.(Learn more about Aptiv)

One final nugget of info gleaned from the survey results – with 1/3 of the total votes, Star Wars rates as the best sci-fi movie, with 2001: A Space Odyssey coming in a distant second place. Other noteworthy mentions included Avatar and Blade Runner.

Below are some other select results of the survey:

74% or respondents indicated that multi-threading capability is important for improving processor performance.

52% of respondents indicated that the primary benefit of multi-threading is in helping to hit target performance at lower frequency; while 31% said its primary benefit is in reducing the need for additional processors.

The biggest challenges for respondents in their work, tied at 36% each, were cited as “time pressures” and “keeping up with the pace of technology.”

Only 11% of respondents said they are using more than four cores in their current design, but another 34% said they expect to move to this number of cores in the next 12 months.

74% of respondents are currently working with single or dual cores.

93% of respondents felt the project they are currently working on would have some level of Internet connectivity.

As a native Israeli now living in the Silicon Valley, I always look forward to the opportunity to travel home. Besides being born in Israel, I spent the first 12 years of my career there and have many friends in the Israeli semiconductor industry.

This month I will travel to Israel to speak at the MIPS Technical Seminar on May 14, an annual seminar hosted by MIPS since 2002. Israel is an extremely important region for MIPS, home to some of our key customers—including Altair, Amimon and Mobileye.  At the MIPS Technical Seminar, which was organized by MIPS’ Israeli Account Director Mauro Diamant, we will provide an update on MIPS, discuss our new Aptiv Generation product line, provide an ecosystem update including the exciting news about MIPS’ inclusion in Version 8 of Google’s NDK, and conclude with an introduction to virtualization-based security. Other speakers at the seminar will include Larry Hudepohl, MIPS’ Vice-President of Hardware Engineering, Amit Rohatgi, Principal Mobile Architect and Eyal Barzilay, Applications & Benchmarking Manager.

Mauro tells me that we already have more than two hundred registered participants!

The Israeli semiconductor industry is in a state of transition, primarily due to a recent wave of acquisitions.  Broadcom and PMC-Sierra have made numerous Israeli acquisitions, while Apple and CSR have followed suit with acquisitions including Anobit and Zoran.  A number of start-ups which MIPS partnered with since their inception had their “exit” through such acquisitions.  It will be interesting and exciting to see how these acquisitions translate into potentially shifting market share and new end products in the coming months and years.

Throughout the years, MIPS has had close relationships with many Israeli start-ups that went on to be acquired.  In 1999 we started working closely with Libit and Metalink which were later acquired by TI and Lantiq. Over time, many other companies went through a similar process: Savan (Lantiq), Galileo (Marvell), Octalica (Broadcom), Percello (Broadcom), Wintegra (PMC), Broadlight (Broadcom) and others.

We love working with Israeli start-ups. Time and again, we have seen these feisty young companies push the boundaries, create cutting edge technology, and in so doing, push us to stretch the limits of our microprocessor cores resulting in unique, out-of-the-box, higher-performing products. MIPS engineers get involved early in the designs, and stay closely connected to ensure a successful outcome.  In my opinion, we give start-ups an edge by the fact that we are ready to try new ideas and exercise the cores in unique ways.   Because of this, I believe there is a special bond between MIPS and the Israeli start-ups with whom we have collaborated.

If you will be in Israel on May 14, please come to learn more about MIPS and our important Israeli partners. As usual, the seminar will also include a MIPS Partners Expo, where a select group of MIPS partners will present their products, their cooperation with MIPS, and live MIPS-Based demos of their products and activities. Among the participating partners are Avnet ASIC, Arteris, Ashling, Carbon Design, Discretix, eSilicon, ESL, Imperas, Alon Tech/Mentor Embedded, Open-Silicon, Pertech/ThreadX, Sightsys, Sonics, SYSGO, Vivante and more.

Visit http://www.mips.com/israel_seminar2012/ and register for our May 14th seminar.  See you all there!

On the heels of Google’s inclusion of the MIPS architecture in Release 8 of the Android NDK, MIPS presented a keynote speech at the ‘Android Day 2012 – Link All Together’ event, held on May 2nd and 3rd in Taipei. Perfect timing!

Several hundred people gathered at the conference to discuss current Android trends and developments. Hot topics included Android application development (and fragmentation), Android UI trends, Android devices, and Android debugging.

With Release 8 of the Android NDK fully supportive of the MIPS architecture, I could confidently predict in my talk a near future where Android apps will work seamlessly across connected devices, despite the processor architecture those devices are based upon. Using Release 8 of the official Android NDK, developers can now develop applications that use native code across architectures, resulting in apps that work on multiple devices including those based on MIPS.

The topic of my keynote was convergence of the smartphone, tablet, DTV, and set-top box platforms, and how Android will play into the future of connected home entertainment devices. While no one will argue that more and more devices are becoming inter-connected, they are still often standalone products. In the future, smartphones, tablets, and TVs will be more integrated and complementary of one another, and Android will be key in making this happen.

DTVs will always be the best way to experience a movie while at home, but aren’t necessarily the easiest way to browse the web. Tablets are perfect “couch computers” to quickly access information instantly at home. Smartphones are best as communications devices, but are also valuable for accessing snippets of information while on the go. PCs are probably going to be relegated to corporate communications devices, best when you want to create Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. While each of these devices serves a different primary function, consumers want their applications to be accessible, and similar in display and usability, across all of their connected devices.

Android is well positioned to be the common platform across these devices. Given that it is license- and royalty-free, more and more OEMs are building Android devices. And if written properly, an Android app can scale between phones, tablets and TVs.

With the official inclusion of MIPS into the Android toolchain, these scalable Android apps, including those coded Native, will work seamlessly with MIPS-Based devices, be they tablet, smartphone, set-top box or DTV.

On May 1, Google released an update to its Native Development Kit (NDK) that allows for the creation of native apps that run on MIPS-Based devices. This is a big deal! Google took notice of the millions of MIPS-Based Android devices and took action to include support for the MIPS ABI.

While developers in the past have been able to obtain a MIPS NDK from the MIPS developer site (http://developer.mips.com), they can now get it from the main Android developer site—where the vast majority of developers obtain the NDK. With this move, we expect many new developers will begin pushing out MIPS-compatible apps in very short time.

The considerable majority of total Android apps (which are Dalvik based) are already available for MIPS-Based platforms. However, with certain graphics-intensive and resource-heavy apps, sometimes developers choose to code native in order to maximize performance and accessibility. We understand that – which is why we’ve been maintaining the NDK with MIPS support on our developer site. Using Release 8 of the official Android NDK, developers can now code native across architectures, resulting in apps that work on multiple devices including those based on MIPS.

Google’s move to include the MIPS ABI in Release 8 of the Android NDK means different things to different people.

For the end-consumer, it ensures that chosen applications will work consistently, across all of one’s connected devices, despite the architecture those devices are based upon – be they MIPS, x86 or ARM.

For the developer, Release 8 holds the promise of new apps being more widely used, and more monetization possibilities. It also opens the door to non-traditional Android segments such as DTVs, set-top boxes and other home entertainment markets (where, by the way, MIPS has a leading market share).

For OEMs, ODMs and silicon partners, it brings freedom of choice, allowing CPU decisions to be made based on an architecture’s merits. (By the way, we believe that MIPS has the best architecture when it comes to price/performance).

For Google, it’s a move that brings credibility to what the company has said many times in the past –that Android was designed to be open to all architectures. And by paving the way for more MIPS-compatible Android apps, this move also has the potential to proliferate Android-based devices several times over.

For MIPS and its customers, this move is both a public acknowledgement of MIPS’ growing importance in the mobile space, as well as an important functional extension of the MIPS mobile ecosystem. As more and more MIPS-Based mobile devices proliferate into the market, the mobile applications ecosystem around MIPS will continue to grow.

Already, several low-cost Android devices based on the MIPS architecture have been released to the market. In fact, the very first tablet to be released with Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” was MIPS! Just last month, Philips released a MIPS-Based, 7” tablet for the China market. This tablet passed the Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) and is now fully certified. We believe this opens the door for GMS (Google apps – such as Google Play, Maps, Gmail) integration in future versions.

With this latest release of the Android NDK, developers can push apps on to an even wider audience through Google Play, the Amazon market and other app marketplaces– where MIPS-Based devices can gain access to them (Google Play requires GMS integration – which is coming soon to some MIPS-based devices).

One of the reasons we have been successful at breaking into the mobile space is due to MIPS’ ability to move with speed and precision. Back in the “Cupcake” days, Android porting to MIPS took months. Since then, our expertise has grown, and mobile silicon based on MIPS, including SoCs from Ingenic Semiconductor and Actions Semiconductor, has matured. On Nov 14th, 2011 – when Android 4.0 became public – it took MIPS only seven days to port it, and another ten days for our silicon partner to bring it up (stable) on a tablet device.

On December 5th, it was a MIPS-Based device (not ARM, not Intel) that became the world’s first available Android 4.0 tablet – this was the Ainovo Novo 7 Basic. And to top that, it was available in retail stores in China for less than US$100. This achievement went unmatched for roughly three months – when other tablets supporting Android 4.0 began to trickle into the market.

The legendary MIPS architecture is known for its leadership in home entertainment and networking applications. Through Android, MIPS-Based applications processors are now in tablets and mobile phones. The release of a MIPS NDK by Google enables app developers to more easily tap into the advantages of the MIPS architecture, further accelerating the adoption of MIPS-based solutions in the mobile segment.

Developers can download the NDK on Google’s Android Developers website at http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html.

Each year, Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona delivers not only the latest in mobile technology, but a carnival-like atmosphere—flashy announcements, colorful displays and elaborate fanfare. The show’s gaudiness is matched only by the Catalan capital itself. But if you remove all the hoopla, the vast majority of attendees have a common goal. Just about everyone is looking for ways to lure the developer, because it’s all about the apps!

When people talk about the mysterious concept called “the ecosystem,” it is the developer community that is being addressed. Whether it’s apps, middleware, connectivity, or games – the name of the game is content. After all, what good is a device if there’s nothing to do with it?

So how do you get engineers to develop apps for your platform? Simple, if you build the hardware, they will come!

Exactly one year ago, at MWC 2011, MIPS had just shown the first MIPS-Based mobile devices and as such, we were relatively unknown to developers. I had to work overtime to arrange meetings and then ports of apps to the MIPS architecture. This year the tides had turned. I arrived at MWC with the world’s first Android 4.0 tablet, at a sub-$100 price point. We had built a competitive mobile device running the latest version of Android, received tons of press, and sure enough the developers came! More than 50 percent of my meetings this year were with developers, many of whom approached us, wanting to bring their content to MIPS-Based devices!

Nobody wants to be the first to join a club, but everyone wants in once it becomes popular, and this was the story for MIPS at MWC 2012.

In the months leading up to MWC, our ecosystem grew in spades. We  announced partnerships with Gameloft (the leader in mobile gaming), Opera (the leader in optimized browser and HTML5 technologies bringing the latest Opera Mobile 12 to MIPS), Xamarin (a leader in promoting cross platform frameworks for developers bringing full Mono support for MIPS, Android and Linux), SAI Technology (promoting LTE middleware accelerated by MIPS unique multi-threaded solutions), Intrinsic ID (promoting a novel security architecture for protecting content delivery to MIPS-Based end-devices), and Altair Semiconductor (a leader in LTE solutions based on MIPS – working with our customer Ingenic to create low-cost LTE Android tablets). We also announced the world’s first Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” tablet in December 2011, as well as an Android 4.0 tablet for the Indonesian market.

At MIPS, we are very proud of our achievement being first to market with an Android 4.0 tablet. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Ingenic Semiconductor and launched Android 4.0 on MIPS within three weeks of it going open source. Even Andy Rubin (Senior VP for Android at Google) lauded the achievement publicly – citing a true testament of the openness of Android (and MIPS is at the cornerstone of proving it!) Like most new hardware devices, this MIPS-Based tablet was something of a leap of faith. We did not have advance commitments from ecosystem partners to develop apps, rather faith that if we built the device, the apps would follow. Our prediction came true.

The reason why Intel has yet to achieve widespread developer attention in the mobile space thus far is they have not delivered hardware for mobile. We expect to this to change in the coming months of course – and welcome it to enrich the overall ecosystem even further.

Of course, hardware must be of a certain quality to attract developers. There are a lot of Shanzai brands and devices out there – what makes the MIPS-Based Android 4.0 tablets different? Well for starters, they are based on the legendary, efficient MIPS architecture, which translates into good performance and very strong battery life. According to John Oram of Bright Side of News, who ran some benchmarks and tested the battery life , “Our estimation is the MIPS-Ingenic Ainol NOVO Basic 7 tablet is superior to the ARM A8 powered platforms. It is equal or superior to the ARM A9, single-core platforms.”

Secondly, there is the not-so-small matter of price/performance. Performance is undoubtedly important, but what drives adoption at the end of the day is affordability. Of course, devices must be fast, have apps and connectivity,  but they absolutely must be attainable by the mass population. A US$600 tablet completely misses the mark in this regard. Let’s talk some proof points:

1. Mid last year, Hewlett Packard did a fire sale on a Snapdragon powered WebOS tablet for $99 that sold out within hours. WebOS (R.I.P.) did not have an ecosystem that could rival iOS or Android. Yet it sold millions within a matter of days.

2. In November, Amazon announced the Kindle Fire – a $200 device that was “good enough” for reading books, email, web browsing, game play etc. It too has sold millions.

3. In December, MIPS (along with its partners – Ingenic and Ainol) announced the world’s first Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) tablet – a sub $100 device – that delivered one-half the performance of the iPad at one-fifth the cost. According to Ainol, hundreds of thousands of units were sold in the first month alone.

4. In February, Speedup/MLW Telecom of Indonesia (along with Ingenic and MIPS) announced a fixed-wireless Android 4.0 tablet with prepaid connectivity for a promotional price of $33. It sold out within days.

With developers now courting MIPS as much as we are courting them, MIPS is perfectly positioned to further grow our ecosystem, whereby developers bring their content to MIPS-Based platforms. A steamroll effect can then take place. With more content, larger OEMs become interested. And as more MIPS-Based devices emerge, developers have more platforms to monetize their content. MIPS is in a very exciting place and we expect important new developments in the coming months. Stay tuned!

By Eyal Barzilay, Applications and Benchmarking Manager

The use of multi-core technology to deliver more CPU horsepower is one of the increasingly common methods to providing higher system performance in hardware. This is true even for high volume consumer applications where cost and power can be very important. However, upgrading to a multi-core system doesn’t automatically guarantee performance improvements or an enhanced user experience. It’s not just a hardware problem – software must be written in a way that can make use of parallel hardware resources. But software is adapting – systems are getting much more complex, such that multiple processes and threads are running simultaneously in many cases, and applications are being written to take better advantage of multiprocessing hardware trends.

With that in mind, we recently used the BrowsingBench™ benchmark from EEMBC to evaluate the performance benefits of MIPS’ multi-core (MC) and multi-threading (MT) technologies. Our objective was to find out how these technologies enhance the user experience of a very popular and very real consumer application – web browsing on the Android™ software platform.

BrowsingBench is a credible and widely used tool that is trusted and cited by leading technology companies. It measures web page loading and rendering time for a large set of web pages with diverse content, and it does this in a reliable way which leads to repeatable and meaningful results. It will run on any connected device with a web browser. And rather than performing a synthetic test, BrowsingBench performs the same operations which a human would perform on the device. We’ve used several other benchmarks in the past that were suitable for evaluating MC/MT system performance; however none represented the real-world user experience on connected devices as well as BrowsingBench.

We ran BrowsingBench on a system based on the MIPS32® 1004K™ Coherent Processing System (CPS). In its maximum implementation, the 1004K CPS can support up to four cores and two hardware threads (also known as Virtual Processing Elements or VPEs) per core. To keep things simple for this test however, the configuration we used was dual core with two VPEs per core, for a total of 4 VPEs. VPEs are essentially logical CPUs that share one physical pipeline in each 1004K core, based on MIPS’ multi-threading technology.

The software platform running on our system was Android, and the web browser we used was the Android browser which comes with every Android-based system.

To evaluate the benefits of multiple cores and VPEs on web browser performance, we ran BrowsingBench using the 4 different configurations listed in the table below. In all cases, the tests were executed on the same dual-core 1004K system; however we used the operating system to enable and disable cores and VPEs.

The big question we wanted to answer was whether Android would be able to take advantage of these multiple processing resources to load and render web pages faster, thereby enhancing the user experience. To do that, Android would have to use parallel processes and threads while executing the browsing workload.
The results, which are shown in the table and chart below, leave no doubt: Android based web browsing performance is greatly enhanced by MC and MT technologies.

The main observation is that browsing performance improves more than 2.5x when comparing the full configuration to the basic configuration. With a great deal of parallel execution under Android, the browser can truly benefit from the combination of MT and MC. A closer look at what’s happening under the hood in the Android system indeed shows that a lot of processes are running in parallel. The two main processes in the system are the Android Browser itself and another process called “system server,” which manages many components of Android including the display system, and is kept very busy during the BrowsingBench run.

Even if we limit the system to a single core, the MIPS MT technology gives us a BrowsingBench performance boost of 43 percent. One of the primary attributes of MT is to improve performance efficiency of a core, which it does by increasing the pipeline utilization of that core when multiple processes and/or threads are running. So for systems where silicon real estate is at a premium, choosing a multithreaded core can be a great way to boost system performance.

When multi-core and multi-threading systems were first introduced into the marketplace, most existing software was not optimized to make good use of these technologies. Today this is changing. Android is a complex software platform, and a perfect example of a high volume consumer platform that is quickly evolving and being optimized for optimal user experience in a Web-connected world.

At MIPS we are very pleased with the benchmark results because they demonstrate that our MC and MT technologies deliver much higher performance than the standard hardware used only a few years ago, and make a significant impact to end users of many connected devices from smart phones and tablets to connected DTVs.

Android 4.0.3 came out from Google on Friday December 16th and who could resist the challenge? So, MIPS engineers picked up the release from the Google source tree and ported it to MIPS within 24 hours. In fact, they decided to push through the weekend and bring 4.0.3 up on the Ingenic/Ainol tablet. Thus we were able to give Ainol a head start towards an over the air (OTA) upgrade for tablets sold to-date plus schedule a switch over to 4.0.3 for new tablets.

But there is more here than just our dedication to supporting MIPS’ licensees and the Android community …

Android 4.0 expands on Google’s use of LLVM, and MIPS completely supports this initiative – in fact, when Google adopted LLVM 3.0 as the basis of Renderscript in Android 4.0.3, MIPS support was already available. So, what is LLVM, and why is it important for the Android community?

LLVM – Low Level Virtual Machine – is an umbrella for modular compiler technologies. It includes a C/C++ compiler front-end, a portable code generator supporting a wide variety of architectures, an aggressive optimizer, and an efficient just-in-time (JIT) compiler on the back-end. Renderscript, the first technology in Android to use LLVM, first became popular in HoneyComb (Android 3.0)–as a set of low-level APIs targeting 3D rendering and compute operations. In fact Renderscript is an example of using the  high-performance APIs provided by LLVM to achieve the same level of system performance that developers could expect were they instead to  use native code on the underlying device. But unlike the existing Android native development kit (NDK), this solution is cross-platform – meaning that applications built using this technology can run on several architectures supported by LLVM.

The inclusion of MIPS optimizations for LLVM in Google’s Android 4.0.3 release takes a great step in making LLVM available for more general use by app developers seeking to exploit native processor performance and capabilities while retaining complete portability in the Android universe.

So what’s behind this LLVM push for Android?

MIPS actually became involved in the industry’s LLVM initiative over a year ago – before it became generally available in Android. This was when MIPS’ compiler group realized that LLVM was going to be a major basis for applications in the future. LLVM had already been the basis of Apple’s application environment for the iPhone and iPad. Our engineers felt that it was only a matter of time before it became the basis of application development environments in the wider market.

We were clearly not alone in our thinking, and so LLVM first appeared in Android.

By supplying our LLVM technology for the MIPS architecture to Google, we have enabled all MIPS licensees, their OEMs and application developers targeting their platforms to have access to the best possible execution environment on MIPS-based platforms, starting with Android 4.0.3. Of course, as Android moves forward, MIPS will make further refinements to LLVM on the MIPS architecture available to Google. We will also make available other optimizations and software related to improving Android’s “out of the box” support for the MIPS architecture.

Android has become an enormous force in the consumer electronics market – a market in which MIPS’ legendary performance, power efficiency and cost effectiveness have been well recognized. The MIPS architecture has already been adopted widely on just about every type of consumer device … cell phones, tablets, set-top boxes, and digital TVs to name a few.

The inclusion of support for the MIPS architecture directly in this latest key facility of Android provides an even more attractive future for all of our licensees and their customers – and ultimately for the end users who continually seek out the best price/performance products available in the market and rely on those products in their day to day lives.

MIPS is moving forward with Android – as always, we are focused on going beyond simply what the market is demanding. We know that providing an enriched apps development environment benefits all end users. More apps, anywhere and any time, running on Android, running on MIPS!

As we all enjoy the features and functions enabled by today’s “smarter” mobile and portable devices, TVs have become smarter too. Today’s TVs are adding internet connectivity, streaming video and TV programming such as Netflix and Hulu, voice/video conferencing capabilities such as Skype, and much more. In addition, Smart TVs can access movies, pictures, and music on any DLNA capable device such as a Windows 7 machine or tablets.

As these devices become more powerful and feature-rich, some people think that we will ultimately see all of the capabilities of TV, mobile phone, tablet and PC converge into one master device. But is that really a possibility?

The short answer is, I don’t think so.

Battery Life

Consider first the matter of battery life. Gone are the days of going a week without needing to charge our phones. Most of us constantly charge our phones at home, work and even in the car just to power a single day. Even with this constant battery charging, many of us swap in other devices to further conserve power. For example, I will use my iPod Touch to watch a movie during an hour at the gym, to be sure I have enough smartphone power for a conference call later in the day. Just imagine the incredible amount of battery life a device would need to provide in order to meet our daily usage appetite for all online/media consumption/phone activities. Today’s devices just can’t supply that.

Size Matters

Secondly, what size would a master device be? Watching video content on my smartphone/tablet is a bit of a compromise. While this is something I would do on a plane or while stuck waiting for hours on end somewhere, while I am at home, I much prefer to watch movies/TV shows in front of my TV.

Some people have proposed that the smartphone can become a set-top box by “docking” it with the TV. This capability will definitely be possible in the near future, but I don’t see this ever replacing a dedicated set-top box that stays in the living room. There are too many questions to sort out: Whose smartphone should be used as the main set-top box? What happens if that person receives a private phone call in the middle of a live football game? What happens if that person is not at home — how would the family watch a program that was recorded on that person’s phone?

At least in my family, this simply wouldn’t work. Even in the future when all data will be stored remotely in the “cloud space,” and each device becomes more or less a screen with all content available on-demand, there will be a need for each device to retain its primary purpose.

Primary Functions

While a smartphone could operate as a master device, it’s very clear that smartphones, tablets, personal computers, set-top boxes, and TVs each have primary functions at which they excel. The smartphone is primarily a phone and mobile internet device. A tablet brings casual email and a better mobile internet experience with its larger screen. The TV is still a one-to-many entertainment device. And the PC is still the best machine for writing reports, developing Powerpoint presentations, and other work-related tasks. In the case of set-top boxes, that primary purpose is delivering premium content in a way that is secure, acceptable to content owners (e.g. HBO and Showtime) and seamless to viewers.

The idea of any one of these devices becoming a “master device” spells compromise for the primary functions of those other devices.

Smart devices will complement each other

What these devices WILL do is complement each other by allowing intelligent interaction between devices. Today, we already see smartphones and tablets being used as remote controls for TVs. Very soon, we will be able to engage in even more advanced integrated tasks.

For example, there have been many times while watching a TV show or movie that I wanted to find out more information about something in real time – perhaps the name of an actor/actress or the location of the scene I’m watching. With a tablet next to me on the couch, I can instantly research the relevant information. Even so, I need to type in my search terms on the tablet to get my information. And while today’s smart TVs allow us to access the internet in order to search directly from the TV, this interaction disrupts the show for everyone else. In the future, smart TVs and set-top boxes will have the ability to deliver relevant keywords to a connected tablet / smartphone by hitting a button on the TV remote allowing a user to search.

In addition, game shows could allow multiple users at home to play along with contestants, vote for participants, or comment in real time. Using a tablet together with a TV during live sports events could enable a user to control different camera views, have user controlled instant replay, or bring up live individual or team statistics, all without disrupting what is being displayed on the TV.

Convergence with a caveat

I believe that convergence will indeed occur among devices, but it will be a kind of functional, not device convergence. We will continue to have separate devices, but they will speak and interact with each other much more seamlessly. Each device will have a lot of similar functionality, but will retain the primary functions at which they excel. Until we have the technology to deliver weeks of battery life on a device that will fit in my pocket and deliver a 60” HDTV experience when I’m home, I see each of these devices being part of our lives. It’s a convergence of functionality, but with a caveat.