Arrival of Multi-Core MIPS into Server Land!

We all know that today's server architecture is predominantly dominated by Sparc,PowerPC and X86 chips. But on the other side, MIPS plays a big role in Networking devices.

There are few startups like Cavium Networks are pioneering the multi-core MIPS chips...The success of this startup itself shows the need for this type of chips but the interesting question is, does these types of chips has a role to play in the server land? It's too early to say yes or no, but the startup Movidis thinks that there is a server market out there for these chips by developing Linux based servers. This PR says that they have ported some real world sw products like Apache Webserver, MySQL database,etc.... This is interesting.

This is not the end, just beginning...For example, what about Java or .NET ecosystem for MIPS? I did some research few years ago for porting JVM to MIPS, the answer I got was that it will take nearly 1.5 years to port it. If JVM alone takes this much time, what about heavy weight servers like App Servers/Web Servers?

Another perspective to this is the new evolving Application Oriented Networking devices! These devices are some where btn servers & networking. Does multi-core MIPS has a role to play in AON?

I think it's interesting to watch the evolution of multi-core MIPS architecture and to see whether it has any role in the server land.