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Loose Lips Sink MIPS
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 6y agoARM was probably what sank MIPS; it seems like the move to China is just a result of the company going under without any way to really make money.
- baybal2 6y agoMoribund sales, and one decade under leadership of lawyers, and bankers sank the company. This all started at the time when ARM was ready to sell their cores on USB sticks to noname Chinese companies.
- monocasa 6y agoYeah, I'd agree with that. Expanding on that I'd say it's that they never ended up in a place where they had real lock in for the ISA, combined with there being better ISA implementations in each of the gate count niches. For any combo of gate count and licensing, Cortex M and R, SH, Xtensa, or PowerPC all made more sense for new designs depending. Classic five stage RISCs are basically a commodity these days.
- inportb 6y agoCool story... but I'd like to learn more about the titular loose lips.
- gumby 6y ago> “A license for all of mainland China has already been sold, lock, stock and barrel.” This is precisely what the U.S. government was trying to avoid when it intervened in the previous acquisition of MIPS Technologies. Why does the U?S? Government care? The MIPS is a mature design that has suffered from neglect for many years and while its useful I can’t imagine how it could be any sort of strategic asset. What am I missing?
- jeffrallen 6y agoThere are probably military systems that use MIPS processors.
- gumby 6y agoSure, I believe I remember an avionics design win but can’t find the reference right now. Those design wins wouldn’t be affected by any such purchases (chips are fabbed by a third party and any procurement contract wouldn’t permit any mask change — quite the opposite). But any new design would pick a new part anyway, and MIPS could simply be dropped from the candidate list — except there would be no reason to: this deal is China-specific and any US supplier would be buying a license from imagination — or from a merchant chip supplier.
- baybal2 6y agoDo you think that Chinese Electronic Warfare companies care about licensing rights?
- RantyDave 6y agoNo, but they might care about being able to get support.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIf you're capable of doing EW, which is basically Black Magic as far as tech is concerned, support for an ISA won't be that much of an issue.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoNot likely to be many. They were never available in a rad hard form. Mil spec micros tend to be old platforms at this point. The most sophisticated was an old PowerPC and there is a VHDL SPARC clone that is popular for ASIC and FPGA implementations.
- 6y ago
- userbinator 6y agoThe patents expired a long time ago, and MIPS has always occupied the ultra-low-end in things like routers and phones. RISC-V may take its place in the future, due to how similar it is.
- harry8 6y agoMIPS has not "always occuppied the ultra-low-end." For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro
- tinus_hn 6y agoOccupying the low end doesn’t mean you can’t make products for the high end as well.
- bonkabonka 6y agoEh, not always. SGI used MIPS to make big servers (and supercomputer clusters) back in the day - although I only ever got to play with an Origin 200[0] and the little Indy that was its console. More cost-effective than Sun hardware at the time (at least in the education market). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_200
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiCortex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiCortex
- xbar 6y agoThanks Apple.
- jecel 6y agoThe author found some nice references but seems to not have read them all. The text says: > It’s been a long, strange trip for MIPS. What started out as a university research project (under Dr. David Patterson, no less) while https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-CHINA/TECH/yzdvxxdlnvx/USA-CHINA-TECH.jpg https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-CHINA/TECH/yzdvxxdlnvx/USA-... has the more correct: > MIPS was developed in 1981 by Stanford professor John Hennessy and his students
- peapicker 6y agoI have a first edition Hennessy and Patterson textbook on the mips architecture from my early 90s college days which I used to write a mips emulator. They BOTH worked on it as original innovators, Hennessy for Mips in specific, Patterson for being a main innovator of RISC architecture to begin with. The pair won the 2017 Turing award for their respective contributions to RISC.
- quantaum_dot 6y agoThe article didn't mention anything about the "loose lips" in the title.