Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/22/is-mips-dead-lawsuit-bankruptcy-maintainers-leaving-and-more/

by abawany • 6 years ago

80 90 6 years ago

cnx-software.com

api• 6 years ago

The writing's been on the wall for MIPS for ages. AFAIK it's not better than ARM in any meaningful way.

unixhero• 6 years ago

Well, good times were had!

yjftsjthsd-h4• 6 years ago

Licensing?

variaga• 6 years ago

My experience is that MIPS and ARM licensing are equally bad.

As an anecdote, I have personally switched a MIPS core to an ARM core in an SoC revision specifically because ARM gave us better licensing terms than MIPS. It was a pain because MIPS big endian and ARM big endian are not directly compatible with each other.

boznz• 6 years ago

Isnt mips open source ?

pm321• 6 years ago

The creator of ARM speaks well of RISC-V and considers ARM yesterday's old news and has moved on. Comparing MIPS to ARM in essentials of architecture is MIPS more beautiful? ARM I understand is a mess that has evolved for its niche.

arnd3• 6 years ago

I find the latest architecture versions are all remarkably similar as they have all adapted to the same environment:

The old 32-bit Arm (now called Aarch32) was quite different and only somewhat RISC-like. Arm's Aarch64 however is mostly derived from MIPS64 with a lot of modernization plus some parts (exception levels) from 32-bit Arm.

MIPSr6 was an attempt of modernizing MIPSr5 by removing all the ugly bits (delay slots!) but the incompatible instruction encoding prevented it from being widely adopted. You cannot buy a single MIPSr6 machine that a mainline Linux runs on.

RISC-V's design looked at all RISC architectures (Berkely RISC, MIPS, SPARC, Power, Arm, ...) for inspiration and took the best parts of each. Leaving out all the historic baggage means it's simpler (the manual is a fraction of the size), but most of the important decisions are the same as in MIPSr6 and Armv8/Aarch64.

One notable difference is the handling of compressed (16-bit) instructions: ARMv8/Aarch64 doesn't have them at all (like RISC-I/RISC-II, ARMv3 and MIPS-V), MIPSr6/microMIPS needs to switch between formats (like ARMv4T through ARMv6) and in RISC-V they are optional but can be freely mixed (somewhat like ARMv7 and nanoMIPS).

justicezyx• 6 years ago

WAVE computing used to be working on CGRA [1] chip as deep learning accelerators. I got in touch with a few folks there. They apparently failed that endeavor and pivoted to MIPS.

[1] https://wavecomp.ai/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/WP_CGRA.pdf

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.

I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerPC, and Alpha AXP.

skissane• 6 years ago

IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.

Not MIPS. Windows NT was initially developed on a more obscure RISC architecture, Intel i860. It was later ported to MIPS though.

simcop23872• 6 years ago

And ported to DEC Alpha too! It's one of my weirdly favorite ports of NT just because of how little use I believe it ever actually got.

neverartful• 6 years ago

Ah! The fabled Intel i860. I remember the massive amount of hype at its debut. It was touted as "Cray on a chip".

I got to play with an Intel iPSC supercomputer in our Physics lab (at university) that used the i860. We had a Sun box that hosted cross-compilers for it and allowed you to reserve a specific number of i860 processors for you. The number had to be a power of 2. Fun times!

mobilio• 6 years ago

Even Microsoft make Jazz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(computer) to develop NT.

Traster• 6 years ago

I remember listening to some guy from ImgTec brag about how MIPS is the 4th biggest instruction set in the world as if MIPS had like 20% market share rather 1% or whetever ridiculous market share ImgTec had bought their way into. That was literally at the peak when ImgTec were on top of the world, they'd just built a new campus and were spending like there was no tomorrow. Then Apple drank their milkshake, and they had to sell everything. Even then though, it was really bizarre that anyone was still trying to make MIPs a thing.

MIPS has been the walking dead for a couple of decades now. It's really time to let go. Especially since there are actually interesting things happening in the ISA space with RISC-V.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but... is RISC-V all that much more alive than MIPS? My impression is that MIPS has a past, RISC-V may have a future, but neither has much of a present.

simcop23872• 6 years ago

For desktop or server class stuff, RISC-V is still shaking out but there are attempts to make it happen on-going right now. For everything else you've got companies like Western Digital that have committed to shipping a billion[2] RISC-V processors for their own devices, and many others. [1]

Just take a look at their membership page for people funding or helping develop the processors, https://riscv.org/members-at-a-glance/

[1] https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v [2] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/281891-western-digital...

opencl• 6 years ago

The only hardware actually currently shipping in meaningful quantities are a handful of microcontrollers. The U540 is pretty much a Raspberry Pi level of SoC but it's only shipped in tiny quantities on expensive dev boards. It's just too new for anything else yet, the higher performance stuff takes years from the start of design work to shipping silicon.

ncmncm3• 6 years ago

There are probably more MIPS cores in currently powered-up equipment than all other 32-bit ISAs combined. Another billion will be manufactured in the next month or two.

There's dead and there's dead. MIPS is only dead in the way that internal combustion engines for transportation are dead.

vardump2• 6 years ago

ARM and RISC-V have collectively removed any remaining niches (or future prospects) for MIPS.

lsllc2• 6 years ago

Except that there aren't really any practical (affordable!) RISC-V based Linux boards/modules.

The Onion Omega2S is based on a MediaTek MT7688 (MIPS32LE) and since the demise of the CHIP-Pro, is really the only inexpensive surface mount Linux SoM left.

https://onion.io/store/omega2s/

vardump2• 6 years ago

That's why I said also "future prospects". It's likely RISC-V will for the very least fill certain niches.

apple4ever• 6 years ago

The Omega2 is pretty nice, but they do need to improve the ecosystem.

0xTJ• 6 years ago

I can't wait for there to be affordable MMU-equipped RISC-V dev boards.

strooper• 6 years ago

May be its days are numbered, but MIPS still has significant presence in the low to medium end routers (Mediatek's MT72xx, Atheros AR7xxx so on).

dashwav• 6 years ago

MIPS still has a very large presence in the education sector as well - MIPS asm is very easy to learn because of how consistent it's syntax is and the plethora of open source debuggers as well.

Learning MIPS was what originally got me interested in ASM programming since we had a class that was focused on MIPS code and another class that had us build a digital MIPS processor from scratch. The combination of these two classes really sold me on the magic of super low-level programming.

333c• 6 years ago

Yep, I also learned MIPS in my CS class. It's pretty nice to program in.

woadwarrior01• 6 years ago

Also, Microchip’s PIC32 microcontrollers, which are still around, have a 32bit MIPS ISA.

ibrault• 6 years ago

Can confirm, I was taught MIPS assembly in a computer architecture course as recently as 2 years ago.

lou1306• 6 years ago

For those who want to take a look, "Computer Organization and Design" by Hennessy and Patterson is a very common textbook on the subject (at least here in Italy). I found reading it to be a very, very instructive experience.

Its version of 32-bit MIPS is so simple, its whole instruction set fit in a 2-side cheatsheet (the famous "green sheet"). The design of the CPU is quite easy too. Given an instruction and its binary representation, it is almost straightforward to see how each bit contributes to the computation (setting the correct ALU operation, retrieving a value from the correct register, etc.).

ndesaulniers• 6 years ago

And I was surprised to find out Wyze brand cameras are MIPS, too! Lots of embedded systems likely still using MIPS.

Polylactic_acid• 6 years ago

I have a crappy nas that is running a MIPS cpu. Basically the only thing I can run on it is Debian because every other distro seems to have dropped support.

monocasa• 6 years ago

Those are really starting to be eaten by ARM over the past few years.

jojobas• 6 years ago

All hail Rick Belluzzo.

csours• 6 years ago

Please help me remove some of my ignorance:

ARM = RISC?

Intel = CISC?

? = MIPS?

What else is out there in large amounts?

alxmdev• 6 years ago

MIPS itself is a RISC, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture

As for what else is out there in large numbers, I think a lot of 8bit Z80 and AVR microcontrollers (like the ATmega328 used in Arduino Uno) are embedded in larger systems and go unnoticed. More recently I've seen the Xtensa (32bit RISC) catching on with the popular ESP32 and ESP8266 SOCs.

saagarjha2• 6 years ago

A number of others you might encounter in your embedded devices: 68k, AVR, Z80. (CISC, RISC, CISC, if you’re curious.)

wk_end• 6 years ago

There’s (sadly) not that much 68k left these days, is there? Do you know of any specific companies still using them? (maybe ones that are hiring? :)

ken• 6 years ago

I assume that all modern CPUs are CISC-ish opcodes running in microcode on a RISC-ish core, and it’s been a few decades since those were useful labels.

zozbot2347• 6 years ago

There's nothing much that's CISC-like about ARM, MIPS or RISC-V. Even many μC architectures are closer to "RISC" than "CISC", though there's at least some room for exceptions there.

fulafel• 6 years ago

RISCs still largely operate on the architected instructions in the pipelines.

It's also a thing to fuse smaller operations into macro-ops in many microarchitectures.

All high performance chips avoid running microcode, it's reserved for eg emulating seldom used legacy instructions. Microcoded CPUs (where all instuctions are implemented with microcode) were a 80s/90s thing.

notacoward2• 6 years ago

MIPS is sort of the original RISC, since one of the two originators of the RISC concept (Hennessy) was a founder of MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. POWER is also RISC, but basically doesn't have any traction beyond IBM itself. SPARC lives on only in radiation-hardened form for the European space agency. Various others never even achieved that level of commercial significance. So it's basically "less RISC than it used to be" Arm, and "more RISC than it used to be" x86.

But there is one notable CISC still out there: IBM's mainframe z/Architecture. Might not sell a lot of units, but it's still pretty important commercially.

yellowapple2• 6 years ago

SPARC lives on only in radiation-hardened form for the European space agency.

Worth noting that POWER similarly lives on in radiation-hardened form for NASA; the RAD750 (and its predecessor, the RAD3000) both have a long history of interplanetary use.

MIPS also sees some use here, too; for example, the MIPS-based Mongoose-V is what New Horizons uses, and the KOMDIV-32 ostensibly is designed for Russian spacecraft use (but I don't know of any specific examples).

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

They're all RISC.

MrTortoise• 6 years ago

i learnt how cpu work on spim

iso-8859-1• 6 years ago

nah, you only learnt how to use them ;)

joyj2nd• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

yellowapple2• 6 years ago

Relevantly, Richard Stallman used to use a Lemote YeeLoong (notebook with a Loongson MIPS CPU) before he switched to a librebooted ThinkPad T400.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

I don't think MIPS is going to completely disappear as long as Linux works on it. Someone somewhere in some country will keep making them as long as the licensing situation is more favorable for whatever use than ARM or x86. If the owning company is going bankrupt that means making MIPS CPUs will be cheaper than ARM or x86.

garmaine• 6 years ago

Hardly. It means the IP will be sold off to someone else, who might just make it more expensive to milk some profit from the deal while pushing customers to their own platform.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 6 years ago

I was under the impression what MIPS was open sourced, in which case "owner" company should be irrelevant?

zozbot2347• 6 years ago

Not so; there was a short-lived initiative to work towards some kind of open release, but it came to nothing. The article mentions that.

DeathArrow2• 6 years ago

In China they have lots of new MIPS developments based on existing MIPS architecture.

The question it's not if someone will use some old MIPS ISA in a few years from now on, the question is if someone will improve the ISA from now on, in the same way x86 and ARM are consistently being improved.

Some companies are still fabbing old Z80 CPUs, but that's not to say Z80 has a bright future.

arnd3• 6 years ago

Ingenic an Loongson both have architecture licenses and so far have kept releasing new chips with their own cores on a regular basis, including (in Loongson's case) some interesting enhancements. Both are also members in the RISC-V foundation already though, so it seems likely they would in the long run pivot their instruction sets to that, like others have done before them: Andes, C-Sky, Cortus, Cobham-Gaisler, NVIDIA, and presumably many more all keep supporting old products based on their previous designs while doing new development on RISC-V.

CIP-United still promises to provide enhanced versions of the both the architecture and the MIPS Warrior cores for the Chinese market, regardless of what happens to MIPS Technologies. This may seem utterly futile now, but it is also the very thing that the US Committee on Foreign Investment was trying to prevent when it required MIPS to be spun out of Imagination Technologies when that got sold to Chinese investors.

narrator• 6 years ago

KOMDIV-64[1] is still using MIPS. It's improbable that one would encounter these chips outside of Russia weapons tech though.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOMDIV-64

CalChris• 6 years ago

It's already been bought+sold a few times.

  (Stanford)
  MIPS Computer Systems
  SGI
  Spun off, IPO
  Imagination
  Tailwood
  Wave

I might have missed one.

DeathArrow2• 6 years ago

Consolidation, together with buyouts and bankruptcy made a part of the computing world much more boring.

In the '90s and early 2000s there were lots of CPUs, computer systems, operating systems.

Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

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