The Loongson 3 devices are hard to get, although apparently you can get them from China; the 2f devices are slow and a wierd version of mips, dont recommend.
The easy to obtain cheap Cavium is the erlite-3 but it has the most non standard usb which means you are pretty much stuck with a tiny amount of storage.
Soft cores are a bit slow, although have seen CHERI running and it is cool. (Risc-V runs NetBSD, at least partial port, not FreeBSD yet).
So there is no useful easily obtained dev device for under $200 (although Imagination did seem helpful on twitter on helping get stuff).
You can always try to use QEMU for OS development when a dev board is not available. The latest version implements Release 6 for 32- and 64-bit MIPS CPUs.
When it comes to development boards, we are working to expand the Creator family to include more options at the high- and low-end.
For those asking if MIPS is dead, my sincere answer is a loud no. We've had a record quarter in shipments, registered over 800m devices last year using the architecture (which represents a 10% increase YoY, by the way).
Tell them to get us a MIPS64 that we can afford. That way people can have their OS's that refuse to deal with MIPS32 issues. Maybe an insanely cheap Warrior core that gives people a taste of its capabilities but can't hurt Imagination's sales in servers/embedded due to configuration of board it comes with. A few benchmarks on that thing and open-source tool development might help increase adoption. Same with MIPS64 board in general though.
Meanwhile, people might have to play with soft-cores such as Plasma and Cambrige's MIPS64 BERI core. FreeBSD already runs on BERI, so that should help. Full cores are still way cheaper to license than ARM, too. ARM pricing is horrific and is about the ecosystem more than the CPU performance/cost.
Ah you were the person on twitter... All three main BSD projects could use hardware - all three support edgerouter lite3 but I think only FreeBSD has more useful hardware. Most of the NetBSD dev is on really old hardware. I am a NetBSD developer, can provide contact (email in profile).
Qemu is pretty annoying for development - it tends to emulate obsolete hardware and it is the drivers that takes time; we already have general architecture support, it is real hardware that is useful. Also qemu is not generally bug for bug compatible and it is slow. It is ok if you are paying someone, but giving away hardware is better to incentivize people who are doing something for free.
