ARM may dominate the lucrative mobile market with its uber-efficient processors, although that hasn’t discouraged MIPS from teaming up with Ingenic to design a dual-core system-on-a-chip for tablets.
Indeed, the JZ4780 SoC is designed for low-power mobile devices and the companies are already showcasing a prototype Android Jelly Bean tablet (4.1) built around the chip at CES 2013.
According to CNX-Software, the JZ4780 is a 1.3 GHz dual-core MIPS Xburst processor with a 40nm design.
As one would expect, it is fully capable of rendering 1080p HD video playback and encoding – due to its PowerVR SGX 540 graphics and video processing unit. The chip also supports HDMI, LVDS and GPS.
As Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, MIPS clearly doesn’t generate as much attention as ARM these days, although the company has been designing low-power chips for decades.
Then again, those chips are far more popular with manufacturers of embedded systems like set-top-boxes, routers and telecommunications equipment.
Nevertheless, there are a small, but growing number of MIPS-powered Android tablets out there (some of which never really made it to market), so it does seem as if the company is making a concerted effort to enter the hyper-competitive and profitable tablet space.
