MIPS III
| Designer | MIPS Technologies, Imagination Technologies |
|---|---|
| Bits | 64-bit (32 → 64) |
| Introduced | 1985 |
| Version | MIPS32/64 Release 6 (2014) |
| Design | RISC |
| Type | Register-Register |
| Encoding | Fixed |
| Branching | Compare and branch |
| Endianness | Bi |
| Page size | 4 KB |
| Extensions | MDMX, MIPS-3D |
| Open | No |
| Registers | |
| General purpose | 32 |
| Floating point | 32 |
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies (formerly MIPS Computer Systems). The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, with 64-bit versions added later. There are multiple versions of MIPS: including MIPS I, II, III, IV, and V; as well as five releases of MIPS32/64 (for 32- and 64-bit implementations, respectively). As of April 2017, the current version is MIPS32/64 Release 6. MIPS32/64 primarily differs from MIPS I–V by defining the privileged kernel mode System Control Coprocessor in addition to the user mode architecture.
Several optional extensions are also available, including MIPS-3D which is a simple set of floating-point SIMD instructions dedicated to common 3D tasks,MDMX (MaDMaX) which is a more extensive integer SIMD instruction set using the 64-bit floating-point registers, MIPS16e which adds compression to the instruction stream to make programs take up less room, and MIPS MT, which adds multithreading capability.
Computer architecture courses in universities and technical schools often study the MIPS architecture. The architecture greatly influenced later RISC architectures such as Alpha.
As of April 2017, MIPS processors are used in embedded systems such as residential gateways and routers. Originally, MIPS was designed for general-purpose computing, and during the 1980s and 1990s, MIPS processors for personal, workstation, and server computers were used by many companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, MIPS Computer Systems, NEC, Pyramid Technology, SiCortex, Siemens Nixdorf, Silicon Graphics, and Tandem Computers. Historically, video game consoles such as the Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable use MIPS processors. MIPS processors also used to be popular in supercomputers during the 1990s, but all such systems have dropped off the TOP500 list. These uses were complemented by embedded applications at first, but during the 1990s, MIPS became a major presence in the embedded processor market, and by the 2000s, most MIPS processors were for these applications. In the mid- to late-1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced was a MIPS processor.
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