4 ms·

MIPS is making RISC-V processors? What happened to the MIPS arch itself?

by MisterTea 5y ago

my123 5y ago
Slowly dithered away...
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Yep. Amazing when you consider that Windows CE ran on MIPS hardware (NEC VR3xxx and VR4xxx chips). Casio's Cassiopeia series for example. It's not quite a "what could have been" because they were really eclipsed by the StrongARM at that point, as I recall, but it's very notable how quickly people lost interest in MIPS.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    WindowsNT ran on MIPS too.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    The PSP (Playstation Portable) was a MIPS device too. My last encounter with MIPS was a payment terminal I worked on in 2014, which sadly never made it to market. There was a company making 'secure' variants with a variety of hardware features suited to payment terminals - a hardware TRNG, a couple of pins which transmitted and received a TRNG signal constantly, so that you could attach a tamper-detection wire and brick the device if it broke, key-erasure features etc.
  - lpmay 5y ago
    The "PIC32" family from microchip is also MIPS based
  - my123 5y ago
    It lived on for quite a while with a strong position in the networking market later on. But then instead of focusing on networking/infrastructure hardware like they could have, they went on a wild goose chase... to try to gain a place in phones.
    - glowingly 5y ago
      To be fair, Power PC was also trying an extended post-AIM life in networking. I don't know if the big-endianess of some networking stacks had anything to do with it. The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard. One could even see it from the Windows Device manager as such :D I see NXP has largely slowed development of their old Freescale PPC lineup (formerly Motorola's PPC and logic division) in favor of arm chips.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        > The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard. In my collection I have an IBM server that has two Pentium II processors and, IIRC, three PowerPCs handling specialized chores such as the network and disk array. The Telum processor is only part of the story of their new mainframe too. While it's the Telum that runs the application code, there are many other different processors (and some Telums with different microcode loaded on boot) performing specialized jobs. The machine can have up to 256 Telum cores, but there's a maximum of 200 that can be dedicated to user code. The remaining cores will be working to ensure the user code doesn't need to wait for anything.
gnulinux 5y ago
MIPS is pretty similar to RISC-V, but RISC-V is a lot more mature by now. Seems like a reasonable business decision.
- FullyFunctional 5y ago
  People are throwing stones, but I suspect you didn't mean mature but perhaps "modern"? RISC-V doesn't carry all the endless legacy of 30+ years of MIPS variants and is in most ways cleaner and more streamlined (I do fear RISC-V is rushing towards its own mess, but that's another story). MIPS (the ISA) _could_ have had RISC-V current position but I don't think MIPS (the company) could have survived. Whether the Phoenix can survive this reinvention remains to be seen. It's a very crowded space, especially for in-order processors.
- masklinn 5y ago
  How can riscv be “more mature” when mips was used in commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years ago? The PS, PS2 and PSP ran on mips. So did the N64. Multiple top500 super-computers were mips. There were mips workstations and servers. mips went to pluto, the new horizon probe ran on mips.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    > How can riscv be “more mature” when mips was used in commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years ago? one thing i can think of is risc-v has done away with branch-delay slots... does modern mips isa still have those?
    - azinman2 5y ago
      That's not what mature means. Mature is that all edge cases have been explored, all kinds of random numerical computations have been expressed, tool chains & debuggers exists in many forms and are well supported, the chips have scaled from dish washers to RAD hardened satellites, etc etc
panick21_ 5y ago
What happened is that SGI dropped it and then it got passed around like between one company after another while it consistently lost more and more market share to ARM. Until MIPS was mostly irrelevant as an arch. So eventually the company realized that trying to only build on MIPS was not gone work, so they Open-Sourced MIPS itself and they are trying to use their knowledge to be part of the RISC-V ecosystem. But since they were late to that game as well, I am skeptical.
- monocasa 5y ago
  > they Open-Sourced MIPS itself Well, they didn't even do that, they just made a big announcement that they were opening up which as far as I could tell just meant they put a link to their sales staff on a web page rather than making you look them up.
glowingly 5y ago
Still used in some consumer devices with older Mediatek (MTK) wireless SoCs and older Qualcomm (QCA) wireless SoCs. Qualcomm has moved onto arm uarch, in addition to largely shuttering their switch ASIC lineup (lots of MIPS in that product family). MTK seems to be moving in the arm direction as well. Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old QCA MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything they can. But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new hardware releases. I recently picked up a TPLink WiFi 6 AP because it used Mediatek wifi chips, which are well supported in the mainline kernel. Was a little surprised to see it still used a Mediatek MIPS SoC as the main glue between the various wireless chips. If you see a WiFi 6 AP that only has WiFi6 on 5GHz, and WiFi4/n on 2.4GHz, a good chance it is using a MTK MIPS WiFi 4/n SoC + a MTK WiFi 6 PCIe IC, with the SoC providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz being provided by something like the MT7915 or similar. The Ubiquiti U6 Lite and U6 LR are examples of this, as are the Belkin RT3200 / Linksys E8450.
- Namidairo 5y ago
  > But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new hardware releases. Yeah the MT7621 is still a popular choice at the lower-end. You'll see it bundled with a WiFi 6 radio sometimes too. You'll see the single-core MT7620 at the even lower lower end as well. > If you see a WiFi 6 AP that only has WiFi6 on 5GHz, and WiFi4/n on 2.4GHz, a good chance it is using a MTK MIPS WiFi 4/n SoC + a MTK WiFi 6 PCIe IC, with the SoC providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz being provided by something like the MT7915 or similar. The Ubiquiti U6 Lite and U6 LR are examples of this, as are the Belkin RT3200 / Linksys E8450. The U6-LR and E8450/RT3200 use the MT7622, which is dual-core ARM Cortex-A53's. The inbuilt 2.4ghz radio is essentially still a MT7615 block doing 4x4 11n though. There's also the MT7986 ("Filogic 830"), which is essentially the same thing but with a 11ax capable radio instead. However I've only seen a couple products using it right now, with quick search reveals one only announced in the last few days too... Edit: Well not really the same thing, it's quad-core, on a smaller process and has revised offload, but you get the gist...
- minimaul 5y ago
  > Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old QCA MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything they can. Mikrotik don't really shove MIPS in anything new! Practically everything they've launched in the last few years is either ARM or ARM64. They seem to particularly love the IPQ-4018/4019 SoCs.

MIPS is making RISC-V processors? What happened to the MIPS arch itself?

my123 5y ago

Slowly dithered away...

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Yep. Amazing when you consider that Windows CE ran on MIPS hardware (NEC VR3xxx and VR4xxx chips). Casio's Cassiopeia series for example. It's not quite a "what could have been" because they were really eclipsed by the StrongARM at that point, as I recall, but it's very notable how quickly people lost interest in MIPS.
- dboreham 5y ago
  WindowsNT ran on MIPS too.
- Nursie 5y ago
  The PSP (Playstation Portable) was a MIPS device too. My last encounter with MIPS was a payment terminal I worked on in 2014, which sadly never made it to market. There was a company making 'secure' variants with a variety of hardware features suited to payment terminals - a hardware TRNG, a couple of pins which transmitted and received a TRNG signal constantly, so that you could attach a tamper-detection wire and brick the device if it broke, key-erasure features etc.
- lpmay 5y ago
  The "PIC32" family from microchip is also MIPS based
- my123 5y ago
  It lived on for quite a while with a strong position in the networking market later on. But then instead of focusing on networking/infrastructure hardware like they could have, they went on a wild goose chase... to try to gain a place in phones.
  - glowingly 5y ago
    To be fair, Power PC was also trying an extended post-AIM life in networking. I don't know if the big-endianess of some networking stacks had anything to do with it. The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard. One could even see it from the Windows Device manager as such :D I see NXP has largely slowed development of their old Freescale PPC lineup (formerly Motorola's PPC and logic division) in favor of arm chips.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      > The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard. In my collection I have an IBM server that has two Pentium II processors and, IIRC, three PowerPCs handling specialized chores such as the network and disk array. The Telum processor is only part of the story of their new mainframe too. While it's the Telum that runs the application code, there are many other different processors (and some Telums with different microcode loaded on boot) performing specialized jobs. The machine can have up to 256 Telum cores, but there's a maximum of 200 that can be dedicated to user code. The remaining cores will be working to ensure the user code doesn't need to wait for anything.

gnulinux 5y ago

MIPS is pretty similar to RISC-V, but RISC-V is a lot more mature by now. Seems like a reasonable business decision.

FullyFunctional 5y ago
People are throwing stones, but I suspect you didn't mean mature but perhaps "modern"? RISC-V doesn't carry all the endless legacy of 30+ years of MIPS variants and is in most ways cleaner and more streamlined (I do fear RISC-V is rushing towards its own mess, but that's another story). MIPS (the ISA) _could_ have had RISC-V current position but I don't think MIPS (the company) could have survived. Whether the Phoenix can survive this reinvention remains to be seen. It's a very crowded space, especially for in-order processors.
masklinn 5y ago
How can riscv be “more mature” when mips was used in commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years ago? The PS, PS2 and PSP ran on mips. So did the N64. Multiple top500 super-computers were mips. There were mips workstations and servers. mips went to pluto, the new horizon probe ran on mips.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andrekandre 5y ago
  > How can riscv be “more mature” when mips was used in commercialised consumer and industrial devices 30 years ago? one thing i can think of is risc-v has done away with branch-delay slots... does modern mips isa still have those?
  - azinman2 5y ago
    That's not what mature means. Mature is that all edge cases have been explored, all kinds of random numerical computations have been expressed, tool chains & debuggers exists in many forms and are well supported, the chips have scaled from dish washers to RAD hardened satellites, etc etc

panick21_ 5y ago

What happened is that SGI dropped it and then it got passed around like between one company after another while it consistently lost more and more market share to ARM. Until MIPS was mostly irrelevant as an arch. So eventually the company realized that trying to only build on MIPS was not gone work, so they Open-Sourced MIPS itself and they are trying to use their knowledge to be part of the RISC-V ecosystem. But since they were late to that game as well, I am skeptical.

monocasa 5y ago
> they Open-Sourced MIPS itself Well, they didn't even do that, they just made a big announcement that they were opening up which as far as I could tell just meant they put a link to their sales staff on a web page rather than making you look them up.

glowingly 5y ago

Still used in some consumer devices with older Mediatek (MTK) wireless SoCs and older Qualcomm (QCA) wireless SoCs. Qualcomm has moved onto arm uarch, in addition to largely shuttering their switch ASIC lineup (lots of MIPS in that product family). MTK seems to be moving in the arm direction as well. Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old QCA MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything they can. But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new hardware releases. I recently picked up a TPLink WiFi 6 AP because it used Mediatek wifi chips, which are well supported in the mainline kernel. Was a little surprised to see it still used a Mediatek MIPS SoC as the main glue between the various wireless chips. If you see a WiFi 6 AP that only has WiFi6 on 5GHz, and WiFi4/n on 2.4GHz, a good chance it is using a MTK MIPS WiFi 4/n SoC + a MTK WiFi 6 PCIe IC, with the SoC providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz being provided by something like the MT7915 or similar. The Ubiquiti U6 Lite and U6 LR are examples of this, as are the Belkin RT3200 / Linksys E8450.

Namidairo 5y ago
> But the older MTK MIPS chips still seem to find a lot of new hardware releases. Yeah the MT7621 is still a popular choice at the lower-end. You'll see it bundled with a WiFi 6 radio sometimes too. You'll see the single-core MT7620 at the even lower lower end as well. > If you see a WiFi 6 AP that only has WiFi6 on 5GHz, and WiFi4/n on 2.4GHz, a good chance it is using a MTK MIPS WiFi 4/n SoC + a MTK WiFi 6 PCIe IC, with the SoC providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz being provided by something like the MT7915 or similar. The Ubiquiti U6 Lite and U6 LR are examples of this, as are the Belkin RT3200 / Linksys E8450. The U6-LR and E8450/RT3200 use the MT7622, which is dual-core ARM Cortex-A53's. The inbuilt 2.4ghz radio is essentially still a MT7615 block doing 4x4 11n though. There's also the MT7986 ("Filogic 830"), which is essentially the same thing but with a 11ax capable radio instead. However I've only seen a couple products using it right now, with quick search reveals one only announced in the last few days too... Edit: Well not really the same thing, it's quad-core, on a smaller process and has revised offload, but you get the gist...
minimaul 5y ago
> Sometimes, we have vendors like Mikrotik who love the old QCA MIPS lineup and shove those ancient SoCs into everything they can. Mikrotik don't really shove MIPS in anything new! Practically everything they've launched in the last few years is either ARM or ARM64. They seem to particularly love the IPQ-4018/4019 SoCs.