[niklasni1]

> R3000 sold extremely well (over 1 million units were produced).

Although I know it's not directly comparable, I was at an ST event recently, and the representative said they were making one million STM32 ARM microcontrollers per day.

[alexvoica]

I know, we've shipped about 800 million MIPS CPUs in the last year alone.

But for that time in history, a million processors was a big milestone. You also have to remember that in 1988 MIPS was a three-year old company battling established vendors.

[axeldeboer]

> You also have to remember that in 1988 MIPS was a three-year old company battling established vendors.

And 10 years after that MIPS has become an embittered outcast, trying to sue potential partners into the ground [0].

Luckily, after yet another 10 years MIPS has grown up and started acting somewhat sensibly [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexra [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#MIPS_patent_issues

[hajile]

I guess that's one reason why we need a completely patent-free ISA.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-14...

[alexvoica]

Both MIPS and ARM sell CPU IP therefore I'm sure anyone here can dig up several examples of patent infringements that ended up in court.

I think what sets us apart from the competition is the fact that a MIPS CPU is now completely open and free for university use, including production-quality Verilog code and tools from Xilinx.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9194/imagination-announces-fre...

[axeldeboer]

It takes quite some big brass b^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PR skills to downplay Lexra disaster that (together with market crash and other events around year 2000) costed MIPS itself quite dearly in both money directly and more importantly in market position. Need I remind you that was right around the time of ARM's spectacular rise: Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm. Only burgeoning xDSL market (and good availability of established binary-only MIPS codebase for it) that saved MIPS in early 2000s.

Not to mention quite egregious fact-twisting I see in your reply on two counts: First, that wasn't really a "patent infringement" - first lawsuit was about trademark infringement - which Lexra arguably was guilty of, but quickly backpedaled, at which point case felt apart. Then MIPS, unhappy with that outcome, launched second, even bigger lawsuit that was technically about patent infringement, but Lexra never actually used the patent in question, and specifically marketed their design as free from lwl/r and swl/r instructions, making the whole thing a theater of absurd going on for years where plaintiff was alleging that Lexra was was yes, not implenting those instructions, but somehow facilitating their clients' emulating those. Hardly that can be called "ended up in court". Whopsie-daisy... "ended up", right...

Providing official Verilog code for an older MIPS core is certainly a massive feat and deserve an applause, but then again there are plenty of other HDL implementations of CPU cores around, MIPS ISA cores included [0]. And patent law have a safe haven for academia [1], so "completely open and free for university use" is just hot air, sorry. Still, it's "official", so there's value in that, of course.

[0] http://opencores.org/project,ion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption

[alexvoica]

I wasn't around to witness the Lexra situation so I can't/won't contradict your observations.

However, I think there are a few other reasons why MIPS did not ride the wave of mobile like ARM did.

First of all, MIPS Technologies acquired mixed-signal design house Chipidea for $147m and then sold it to Synopsys for $22m after a rocky two-year integration process.

Secondly, MIPS management focused on markets like networking and home entertainment (set-top boxes, digital TVs, etc.) which did not enjoy the explosive growth of mobile.

To address the second part of your comment about MIPSfpga, this is not "an older core". It is a current-generation CPU capable of running Linux. It is used today in the Microchip PIC32 and the Samsung Artik 1 MCUs - two products that were released within the last year. Furthermore, most of these open cores implement MIPS III or IV architectures from two decades ago whereas MIPSfpga is MIPS32 Release 3. In addition, MIPSfpga implements industry-standard interfaces which make the core much easier to use on an FPGA.

[hga]

Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm.

Case in point: in the first half of 2001 I worked at Lucent on a board that had something like 288 or more dial up modem channels (this was once a part of Ascend Communications). It had a bunch of specialized Analog Devices chips doing the heavy lifting, a bunch of ARM processors controlling them ... and one MIPS processor doing system housekeeping.

[rjsw]

The recently released official MIPS core has a standard bus interface so it will be much easier to extend it in student projects than any of the OpenCores designs.

[kabdib]

My housemate and I used to joke about CPUs someday being so cheap that they would "fall out of cereal boxes as the prize."

The STM8, a chip about 5X more powerful than the first computer I owned, has a variant that is under 17 cents in quantity. Doesn't quite qualify as mommy-buy-me-that-cereal prize material, but it's damn close.

The number of 8-bit CPUs sold every year must dwarf the number of 32-bit ones, yes?

[kjs3]

If found it a bit difficult to get accurate sales numbers of how all 32-bit embedded processors compare to all 8-bit embedded processors. However, there are still tens of billions of Intel 8051 (introduced in 1980) derived processors/cores/IP shipped every year, so it's safe to assume the whole market is still vast.

[alexvoica]

I can tell you that ARM and MIPS ship about 5bn 32-bit MCUs per year combined. I can't give you a statistic for 8- or 16-bit MCUs though.

[kjs3]

Yeah...I get the same handwavey number for ARM & MIPS; its a crazy successful market. And it's clear that 32-bit is the future, for some value of future.

That said, trying just to understand how many 8051 derivatives is almost impossible. There are many dozens of vendors who supply chips, cores & other embedded IP, many of whom don't even call it 8051 any more. There's probably a few tens of them within 100 feet of you. Much less the 20 or so other significant 8-bit families.

It's a shame that hard data is only available from high dollar market research firms, but I suppose they did the legwork and deserve something for the work.

[rwmj]

And even that is only a fraction of the 10 billion ARM cores made each year (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7909/arm-partners-ship-50-bill...)