A history of MIPS, the processor architecture and the chip making company.
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@amoroso very nice reading. I had so much fun writing assembly and porting programs for that architecture. Missed the reference that mips was widely used in routers too. And I wish China would at some point sell loongson/loongarch cpus outside their borders. They seem to be quite paranoid on this.
@pancake Thanks, glad you like it.
@amoroso
"Super Mario 64’s MIPS (the rabbit) was so named because the console that the game was developed for was powered by a ‘MIPS CPU’"
I thought about the name being similar but I never knew that was the reason for naming that character :o
@Nocta_Senestra As a non gamer I wasn't even aware of the character.
"what MIPS (the company) doesn’t bring to GlobalFoundries is MIPS (the architecture), as MIPS (the company) abandoned MIPS (the architecture) back in 2021, switching instead to RISC-V"
"... hyperactive series of corporate actions:
Acquired by Imagination Technologies in 2012;
Sold to Tailwood Venture Capital in 2017;
Sold to Wave Computing in 2018;
Wave Computing declares bankruptcy in 2020;
Wave Computing emerges from bankruptcy in 2021 as MIPS.
And here is the rub; an unstable corporate parent is the last thing an Instruction Set Architecture needs.
"
@EdS Not even Commodore faced so much instability.
This I didn't know:
"When development started in November 1989, Windows NT ... was targeted at the Intel i860XR RISC processor, switching to the MIPS R3000 in late 1989, and then the Intel i386 in 1990."
@EdS I had vague recollections of a MIPS R3000 port of Windows NT.
This too I didn't know
"MIPS, also known as the Yellow Rabbit, is a minor character found in the basement of the Mushroom Castle in Super Mario 64. He is Princess Peach's pet rabbit"
"MIPS is named after the MIPS architecture"
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