Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?
Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#22Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?
MIPS itself is a RISC, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture
As for what else is out there in large numbers, I think a lot of 8bit Z80 and AVR microcontrollers (like the ATmega328 used in Arduino Uno) are embedded in larger systems and go unnoticed. More recently I've seen the Xtensa (32bit RISC) catching on with the popular ESP32 and ESP8266 SOCs.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#23May 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).
I have a crappy nas that is running a MIPS cpu. Basically the only thing I can run on it is Debian because every other distro seems to have dropped support.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#24Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?
[deleted]
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#25Please help me remove some of my ignorance: ARM = RISC? Intel = CISC? ? = MIPS? What else is out there in large amounts?
A number of others you might encounter in your embedded devices: 68k, AVR, Z80. (CISC, RISC, CISC, if you’re curious.)
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s nice until you get to its annoying and fairly irrelevant pipelining model.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#27May 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…
Also, Microchip’s PIC32 microcontrollers, which are still around, have a 32bit MIPS ISA.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I’m pretty sure the PowerPC port of Windows NT was the least used. It was the first to be discontinued, at least.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I also learned MIPS in my CS class. It's pretty nice to program in.
It’s nice until you get to its annoying and fairly irrelevant pipelining model.
The ubiquitous delay slots in MIPS are one instruction-set feature that has aged really badly. RISC-V actively got rid of it in their design because it ends up being such a hindrance to, e.g. out-of-order implementations.
Re: Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
#30May 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).
Those are really starting to be eaten by ARM over the past few years.