Stanford MIPS

MIPS (an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) was a research project conducted at Stanford University between 1981 and 1984. MIPS investigated a type of instruction set architecture (ISA) now called Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), its implementation as a microprocessor with very large scale integration (VLSI) semiconductor technology, and the effective exploitation of RISC architectures with optimizing compilers. MIPS, together with the IBM 801 and Berkeley RISC, are the three research projects that pioneered and popularized RISC technology in the mid-1980s. In recognition of the impact MIPS made on computing, Hennessey was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2000 by the IEEE (shared with David A. Patterson), the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2001 by the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2001 by the IEEE Computer Society.

The project was initiated in 1981 by John L. Hennessy in response reports of similar projects at IBM (the 801) and the University of California, Berkeley (the RISC). MIPS was conducted by Hennessy and his graduate students until its conclusion in 1984. Hennessey founded MIPS Computer Systems in the same year to commercialize the technology developed by the project. In 1985, MIPS Computer Systems announced a new ISA, also called MIPS, and its first implementation, the R2000 microprocessor. The commercial MIPS ISA, and its implementations went on to be widely used, appearing in embedded computers, personal computers, workstations, servers, and supercomputers. As of May 2017, the commercial MIPS ISA is owned by Imagination Technologies, and is used mainly in embedded computers. In the late 1980s, a follow-up project called MIPS-X was conducted by Hennessy at Stanford.

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