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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

#41

Post by garmaine »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #35

I don't think MIPS is going to completely disappear as long as Linux works on it. Someone somewhere in some country will keep making them as long as the licensing situation is more favorable for whatever use than ARM or x86. If the owning company is going bankrupt that means making MIPS CPUs will be cheaper than ARM or x86.

Hardly. It means the IP will be sold off to someone else, who might just make it more expensive to milk some profit from the deal while pushing customers to their own platform.

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

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

wott wrote: post #33
333c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MIPS is typically seen in computer architecture class because it is simple and regular (at least the original version seen in class). However, for Assembly programming, MIPS, like (almost?) all RISC instructions sets, is tedious. Give me any CISC with a generous range of addressing modes, and I take any day over MIPS/RISC. We can make a parallel between those low-level ISA and high-level languages: a language like Li…

Traditional addressing modes have been largely abandoned because modern architectures are based on the load-store principle. Simplicity has little to do with it, and referring to that whole shift in design as "complex" vs. "simple" instruction sets is a bit of a misnomer. Besides, well-designed architectures are not exactly lacking in ease-of-use.

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

#43

Post by mobilio »

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…

Even Microsoft make Jazz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(computer) to develop NT.

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

#44

Post by variaga »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #2

The writing's been on the wall for MIPS for ages. AFAIK it's not better than ARM in any meaningful way.

Licensing?

My experience is that MIPS and ARM licensing are equally bad.

As an anecdote, I have personally switched a MIPS core to an ARM core in an SoC revision specifically because ARM gave us better licensing terms than MIPS. It was a pain because MIPS big endian and ARM big endian are not directly compatible with each other.

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

#45

Post by trogdc »

wott wrote: post #33
333c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MIPS is typically seen in computer architecture class because it is simple and regular (at least the original version seen in class). However, for Assembly programming, MIPS, like (almost?) all RISC instructions sets, is tedious. Give me any CISC with a generous range of addressing modes, and I take any day over MIPS/RISC. We can make a parallel between those low-level ISA and high-level languages: a language like Li…

Well I don't think most people these days are interacting with assembly by hand-writing programs. The real users of ISAs now are compiler authors, and the simpler and regular languages seem better for them. So is there some other reason (other than inertia) that RISC isn't practical?

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

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

ken wrote: post #38
csours wrote: post #20

Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?

I assume that all modern CPUs are CISC-ish opcodes running in microcode on a RISC-ish core, and it’s been a few decades since those were useful labels.

There's nothing much that's CISC-like about ARM, MIPS or RISC-V. Even many μC architectures are closer to "RISC" than "CISC", though there's at least some room for exceptions there.

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

#48

Post by zozbot234 »

wolfgke wrote: post #37
wk_end wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s (sadly) not that much 68k left these days, is there? Do you know of any specific companies still using them? (maybe ones that are hiring? :)

In terms of hardware: NXP ColdFire.

The Apollo Vampire is a newly-designed implementation on FPGA's that compares very favorably wrt. performance with existing 68k (and ColdFire) hardware.

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

#49

Post by ibrault »

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…

Can confirm, I was taught MIPS assembly in a computer architecture course as recently as 2 years ago.

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

#50

Post by notacoward »

csours wrote: post #20

Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?

MIPS is sort of the original RISC, since one of the two originators of the RISC concept (Hennessy) was a founder of MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. POWER is also RISC, but basically doesn't have any traction beyond IBM itself. SPARC lives on only in radiation-hardened form for the European space agency. Various others never even achieved that level of commercial significance. So it's basically "less RISC than it used to be" Arm, and "more RISC than it used to be" x86.

But there is one notable CISC still out there: IBM's mainframe z/Architecture. Might not sell a lot of units, but it's still pretty important commercially.

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