A couple of weeks ago, in a shadowy corner of a fancy coffee house in London, I was handed a rather interesting gadget: a white, nondescript 9.7-inch tablet. I tapped the power button, and the Firefox OS lock screen appeared. That wasn't the surprising bit, though. Rather unusually, there was a MIPS-based CPU inside the device.

In February, Imagination Technologies released the CI20 single-board computer—essentially a Raspberry Pi-like computer for developers and DIY types, but it came with a 32-bit MIPS chip at the helm rather than x86 or ARM. So this new tablet, made by the Chinese company Ingenic, won't ever go on sale. Rather, it's a reference tablet that Imagination Technologies will give out to developers and hobbyists to get them onto the MIPS bandwagon.

During my brief hands-on experience with the tablet, the fact that it was a reference device was readily apparent: it felt cheap and plasticky, there was a lot of flex in the chassis, and the backlight was probably the most uneven that I'd ever seen. There were two spots on the screen that were so bright that it looked like a couple of LEDs were shining straight out rather than being nicely diffused. On the plus side, though, there was a full-size HDMI socket, a 5-volt DC barrel connector, and a micro USB connector on the left side of the device—useful additions for developers or hobbyists.

Software-wise, there isn't much to report. It felt like Firefox OS but with a slightly rejigged tablet UI. The OS certainly didn't fly—the frame rate dipped whenever I swiped between screens or loaded up an app—but at the very least it was functional. The tablet can also run Android 4.4, though it isn't dual-boot; you have to flash the firmware with an Android 4.4 MIPS image.

In any case, the performance and fit and finish of the tablet are mostly inconsequential. The bigger story here is that Imagination Technologies is making an ecosystem play. At the end of 2012, Imagination acquired MIPS Technologies, the fabless semiconductor company that owns the MIPS instruction set and designs and licenses MIPS CPU cores. Just six months later, in mid-2013, Imagination announced a new range of Warrior CPUs, with mid- and high-end cores targeted specifically at smartphones and tablets. Now, with the CI20 and the Ingenic Firefox OS tablet, it's time to get developers onto the MIPS bandwagon.

Imagination Technologies tells us that around 800 million chips with MIPS CPU cores were shipped last year. But since they're mostly used in embedded and very low-power settings, it's ARM and x86 that get most of the attention from the press and, in turn, the developers. There's no specific reason that your next smartphone or tablet couldn't be powered by a MIPS chip—but an architecture on its own, no matter how efficient or powerful it might be, is meaningless without the requisite consumer and developer ecosystems.

If you're a developer or hobbyist and want to get your hands on the new Firefox OS tablet, Imagination Technologies is running a giveaway.