netbooks with Loongson 2 processor run MIPS64 linux
James Larkby-Lahet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
open source boot loader should make for easy porting, Linux, Windows
CE and NetBSD have made the jump.
1st chip is currently available (in china? RMS has one...) in $350
netbooks, tiny desktops:
"Loongson 2F
4-way superscalar, out-of-order execution, 64-bit MIPS architecture
processor core
Little-endian MIPS III-compatible ISA
5 execution units: 2 ALUs, 2 FPUs, and 1 address generation unit (AGU)
SIMD unit is integrated with one of the 2 FPUs
Separate 64/64 KB instruction and data L1 caches
On-chip 512 KB 4-way set-associative L2 cache
Integrated DDR2 memory controller
Integrated very simple video accelerator
Software-controlled dynamic power management
Max 4 W at 1 GHz
Loongson 3
The 65 nm Loongson 3 (Godson-3) is able to run at a clock speed
between 1.0 to 1.2 GHz, with 4 CPU cores (10W) first and 8 cores later
(20W), and it is expected to debut in 2010.[8] The first version of
the chip will only support DDR2 DRAM, will not have SMT support or a
_built-in_ network interface.
Hardware-assisted x86 emulation
Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction
execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions
help QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of
executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With
additional improvements in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an
average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries while
running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks."