MIPS Creator CI20 Review – First Look

Power Utilization

I will update this review with power utilization figures. I tried to run the test hours before I went to press by trying to power the MIPS Creator CI20 using the JTAG header – which should work, according to my reading of the schematic – however it did not work.

I will have to cut into the cable of the power supply provided by Imagination in order to place a current probe in-line.

Support

The MIPS Creator CI20 is a new development board. It is not a mass-market board designed for education, and does not have the same level of support – nor should it be expected.

There are two support forums on Google+ … one general group for developers, and a kernel patch group.

I get the feeling that there is only one – perhaps two – Imagination staff looking at the forum, when they have time to spare from driver fixes and development. I would not be surprised if there were no employees dedicated to the CI20 and providing support for it. The low volume of postings shows that there are not many users and developers on the forums yet.

That being said, I have had both helpful responses – providing URL’s to relevant information, and less than helpful responses to my posts – wait for the next kernel, the sources are available so you can improve anything yourself.

The level of support is consistent with that provided to individual developers by a development board manufacturer targeting large customers.

I am quite certain that a large company developing a large volume product would receive excellent support.

MIPS Creator CI20 Review @ https://Mikronauts.com

(click on image for larger version)

Conclusion

The MIPS Creator CI20 shows a lot of promise – but it needs a lot more development on certain drivers (NAND, SD, Ethernet, WiFi) and software before educational or general users should consider it.

Developers interested in MIPS based boards and alternatives for ARM boards would be well advised to check out the CI20 – it has a lot of potential, and I intend to keep an eye on driver developments.

I started working on this review last November, but decided to hold off publishing in hope of software updates. Normally I would not shelve a review this long, but I wanted to give the software a chance to catch up to the hardware. Since then, I’ve tried two updated Debian releases, and while they improved driver support, and reduced the load average, performance of the very slow NAND reads, and Ethernet I/O has not noticeably improved.

The NAND chip used is capable of close to 40MB/sec reads, yet testing shows it to only read at best 8MB/sec on an SOC bus capable of 100MB/sec … I suppose it is fortunate that there is at least a lot of room for improvement.

I was also very disappointed at the iperf Ethernet benchmark results – 27Mbps is a poor showing on 100Mbps Ethernet – even the single core 700MHz Raspberry Pi has almost twice the performance. And the WiFi performance is far worse.

I have no doubt that the NAND / SD / Ethernet / WiFi performance will improve in time, and apparently the upcoming 3.16 kernel will provide some performance improvements, however I don’t understand why these significant performance limitations have already not been addressed, after all, they have been known for at least three months.

The integer performance was quite good, and the floating point performance was decent – both significantly better than that of the Raspberry Pi when you take the second core into account.

For its intended target – developers interested in MIPS based SOC’s – the MIPS Creator CI20 is a must-have board, and the price is very reasonable for a dual core development board with 1GB of ddr3 and WiFi.

For end users, hobbyists and makers, I’d wait until the driver performance is up to par.

What I liked:

  • very crisp video out
  • on-board WiFi
  • on-board Bluetooth
  • fast OpenGL ES
  • lot of gpio
  • analog inputs
  • optional second SD interface
  • can boot of NAND

What I did not like:

  • slow booting and loading due to slow NAND drivers
  • slow Ethernet
  • extremely slow WiFi
  • no gpio support libraries

Related Links

Article Index

  1. CI20: Introduction, Does the MIPS Creator CI20 look like a Raspberry Pi?
  2. CI20: Closer Look at the MIPS Creator CI20
  3. CI20: Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
  4. CI20: Software Compatibility, Debian, Common Application, GPIO, Multimedia
  5. CI20: Hardware Compatibility, RoboPi, Pi Jumper, EZasPi, WiFi and Bluetooth, Documentation
  6. CI20: Benchmark Results (Launch times, SysBench, iperf, nbench, UnixBench, dd, hdparm)
  7. CI20: Power Utilization, CI20: Support, Conclusion

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