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> Is MIPS still a big enough name to make this much of a coup for RISC-V? Or is this the last ditch effort of a fallen star of the semi market? Mips has seemin

> Is MIPS still a big enough name to make this much of a coup for RISC-V? Or is this the last ditch effort of a fallen star of the semi market? Mips has seemingly been on life support sine the late 90's. I kind of think the SGI buyout and later spin-off doomed them as they were focused on building high performance workstation processors while Arm was busy focusing on low power and embedded systems. Guess who was better prepared for the mobile revolution of the 00's?

mikepurvis 6y ago
It's interesting that that's where they've been focused, because my only exposure to MIPS chips has been in low-cost Mikrotik routerboards, eg: https://mikrotik.com/product/RB450 https://mikrotik.com/product/RB450
- tyingq 6y ago
  I imagine MIPS (via Atheros, Broadcom, etc) was broadly deployed in things like home routers because it was royalty free, power efficient, and already had Linux kernel mainline support. Though probably losing share to ARM now.
  - theodric 6y ago
    Indeed, Asus moved from MIPS to ARM between the RT-AC66U and RT-AC68U, and the various *pkg repos have since dropped support. MIPS may as well be dead.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    Think they are used for the network offload engine in some ethernet adaptors too.
- pajko 6y ago
  MIPS was being used in set-top-boxes and media players as well, like https://www.imaginationtech.com/blog/dont-let-the-cpu-control-you/ https://www.imaginationtech.com/blog/dont-let-the-cpu-contro...
- Keyframe 6y ago
  Powered all SGI workstations up to the end (excluding Windows NT adventure SGI had), and powered both Nintendo 64 and Playstation (1). MIPS was quite hot back then.