[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.