MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages), founded in 1981 by John Hennessy, president of Stanford University and current chairman of the Alphabet board, also used a reduced instruction set design and even became a direct competitor to Arm. However, it was later abandoned by Wave Computing, which later acquired it.
Compared to the Arm architecture design currently adopted by most processor manufacturers, the MIPS architecture actually developed faster in the early stages than Arm, even entering the 64-bit design stage earlier. Even Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows platforms support the MIPS instruction set.
However, because the MIPS architecture licensing model is not open enough and has more usage restrictions than the Arm architecture licensing model, it gradually lost its development advantage in the market and was acquired by Imagination Technologies in November 2012.
Imagination Technologies originally planned to acquire MIPS design assets and expand its development by combining CPU and GPU resources, but ultimately failed to achieve significant results. Subsequently, in 2017, the MIPS assets were transferred to the venture capital firm Tallwood for US$6500 million.
In June 2018, Wave Computing announced the acquisition of MIPS and allowed MIPS to maintain independent operation, but also open sourced the MIPS architecture in the hope of attracting more market use. However, because the market has almost shifted to the Arm architecture design and development model, the MIPS architecture has lost development space.
Although Wave Computing subsequently declared bankruptcy, it did not affect the development of MIPS, which was already operating in an independent form. However, in the absence of growth space, Wave Computing obviously did not want to continue to promote the MIPS architecture design. Therefore, it fully turned to the RISC-V camp, which is also designed with an open source architecture, and built subsequent processor products based on the RISC-V architecture.
