To be crystal clear: my statement pertained to 32-bit MIPS CPU's and MIPS CPU's predating the R8000. They were very slow. 32-bit MIPS CPU's did not have multipl

To be crystal clear: my statement pertained to 32-bit MIPS CPU's and MIPS CPU's predating the R8000. They were very slow. 32-bit MIPS CPU's did not have multiply and division instructions, they had branch delay slots that are unwieldy for a compiler to generate the efficient code for, plus other stuff. Early 32-bit MIPS implementations did not even have a hardware TLB (it was implemented in the kernel), which made the context switching between kernel and user spaces slow. R8000 (MIPS IV) was fast and later MIPS64 CPU's were very fast, especially on floating point operations, and consistently outperformed competing 64-bit RISC and x86 CPU's because the MIPS64 was an ISA redesign that addressed and fixed many of the problems of the 32-bit version of the ISA.