MIPS was a fairly early and ‘fundamentalist’ implementation that actually held its own for quite a long while in a very competitive segment of the market (micro

MIPS was a fairly early and ‘fundamentalist’ implementation that actually held its own for quite a long while in a very competitive segment of the market (microprocessors for high-end Silicon Graphics machines competing with other UNIX workstations). It had nowhere near the constant level of investment in R&D that Intel’s x86 (and other architectures, including other RISC workstation chips) enjoyed. So it's not entirely fair to point it out as being an abject failure that got relegated to the dustbin of history and is relegated to lowest of the low applications (embedded processors for commodity hardware).