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Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

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Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#11

Post by simcop2387 »

skissane wrote: post #7
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code. I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerP…

> IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code. Not MIPS. Windows NT was initially developed on a more obscure RISC architecture, Intel i860. It was later ported to MIPS though.

And ported to DEC Alpha too! It's one of my weirdly favorite ports of NT just because of how little use I believe it ever actually got.

Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#13

Post by neverartful »

skissane wrote: post #7
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code. I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerP…

> IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code. Not MIPS. Windows NT was initially developed on a more obscure RISC architecture, Intel i860. It was later ported to MIPS though.

Ah! The fabled Intel i860. I remember the massive amount of hype at its debut. It was touted as "Cray on a chip".

I got to play with an Intel iPSC supercomputer in our Physics lab (at university) that used the i860. We had a Sun box that hosted cross-compilers for it and allowed you to reserve a specific number of i860 processors for you. The number had to be a power of 2. Fun times!

Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#14

Post by opencl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #9
Traster wrote: post #6

I remember listening to some guy from ImgTec brag about how MIPS is the 4th biggest instruction set in the world as if MIPS had like 20% market share rather 1% or whetever ridiculous market share ImgTec had bought their way into. That was literally at the peak when ImgTec were on top of the world, they'd just built a new campus and were spending like there was no tomorrow. Then Apple drank their milkshake, and they h…

Pardon my ignorance, but... is RISC-V all that much more alive than MIPS? My impression is that MIPS has a past, RISC-V may have a future, but neither has much of a present.

The only hardware actually currently shipping in meaningful quantities are a handful of microcontrollers. The U540 is pretty much a Raspberry Pi level of SoC but it's only shipped in tiny quantities on expensive dev boards. It's just too new for anything else yet, the higher performance stuff takes years from the start of design work to shipping silicon.

Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#15

Post by dashwav »

strooper wrote: post #12

May be its days are numbered, but MIPS still has significant presence in the low to medium end routers (Mediatek's MT72xx, Atheros AR7xxx so on).

MIPS still has a very large presence in the education sector as well - MIPS asm is very easy to learn because of how consistent it's syntax is and the plethora of open source debuggers as well.

Learning MIPS was what originally got me interested in ASM programming since we had a class that was focused on MIPS code and another class that had us build a digital MIPS processor from scratch. The combination of these two classes really sold me on the magic of super low-level programming.

Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#16

Post by ndesaulniers »

strooper wrote: post #12

May be its days are numbered, but MIPS still has significant presence in the low to medium end routers (Mediatek's MT72xx, Atheros AR7xxx so on).

And I was surprised to find out Wyze brand cameras are MIPS, too! Lots of embedded systems likely still using MIPS.

Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

#18

Post by 333c »

dashwav wrote: post #15
strooper wrote: post #12

May be its days are numbered, but MIPS still has significant presence in the low to medium end routers (Mediatek's MT72xx, Atheros AR7xxx so on).

MIPS still has a very large presence in the education sector as well - MIPS asm is very easy to learn because of how consistent it's syntax is and the plethora of open source debuggers as well. Learning MIPS was what originally got me interested in ASM programming since we had a class that was focused on MIPS code and another class that had us build a digital MIPS processor from scratch. The combination of these two…

Yep, I also learned MIPS in my CS class. It's pretty nice to program in.
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