Talk:MIPS architecture

Influence on SPARC
I'd like to question the influence on SPARC. There were three RISC designs very early, that were demonstrations of the technology.


 * 1) The IBM effort under John Cocke. This was virtually unknown outside IBM until much, much later, but may have been the inspiration for IBM projects including ROMP, Power, and PowerPC.
 * 2) The Berkeley RISC project. An academic project that was probably the main inspiration for SPARC.
 * 3) The Stanford project. An academic project that was definitely the main inspiration for the commercial MIPS RISC.

SPARC and (commercial) MIPS were developed at much the same time so it is unlikely that commercial MIPS had much influence on SPARC. The original Stanford chip was a bit older than SPARC, and the SPARC people were certainly aware of it, but in looking at the major differences between Stanford and Berkeley RISC (sliding register window only in Berkeley, and not much else) SPARC follows the Berkeley model. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.37.81.xxx (talk) 10:38, 4 October 2001 (UTC)


 * Marice Wilkes states (in the foreword to Patterson/Hennessy) that MIPS is more-or-less the Stanford RISC project while SPARC is the commercialised Berkeley RISC. I therefore reformulated the sentence so that both are credited with influencing later RISCs. --Robbe 15:51, 25 February 2002 (UTC)

Use in TiVo
I believe the Series II TiVo's use MIPS and that's likely a high enough profile use to warrant a mention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.184.177.118 (talk) 16:52, 5 July 2005 (UTC)

External links modified
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Remove of Comprehensive List of MIPS I Instructions and Opcodes
I consider Thumperward action as total destruction of Wikipedia article. MIPS is model architecture for the most top class universities Computer Architectures courses (OK, move to RISC-V can be expected as future step). The remove of tables makes article useless for all our courses. We have not copied full tables (or copied it from official manuals which we reference as well) to our course pages, because we have been happy that there is Wikipedia and used the reference to this article as a opportunity to show our students that it is valuable source of information. We cannot correct previous year archived course pages to add own table into it (it is read-only even for us, teachers). We can grab old Wikipedia tables and copy it to our course and add big warning to trust some Wikipedia content guardians, I have already very bad experience in past with such person in another case where we want to share our knowledge and 20 years of investment into open-source with others. I have found problem result of Thumperward action exactly now and I need to warn immediately all my seminaries tutors, that we are in troubles what to do with students tomorrow. One of our many pages referencing Wikipedia is there https://cw.fel.cvut.cz/wiki/courses/b35apo/en/tutorials/03/start. Pavel Pisa — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.102.8.6 (talk) 08:03, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * WP:NOTMANUAL. Manuals such as that would belong in a place such as Wikibooks, if you don't just want to point students to the R4000 Preliminary Users Manual (or one of the European mirrors) at bitsavers.org, or to the manuals at mips.com, which the page you link to already does. Guy Harris (talk) 08:33, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * OK, I agree that the last version of the page was quite huge, but comprehensible instruction table like in 2016 page version seems to me fully appropriate for page about architecture which influenced by its instruction set simplicity and usability computers architectures development including even internal principles of CISC CPUs like Intel. As for the students, many of them do not like to read textbook, it is too huge. There is almost zero chance that they would look top the manual (in addition non indexed). The original table was of great value because it provided acceptable detail level (quick overview). Pavel Pisa — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.102.8.6 (talk) 00:11, 5 March 2020 (UTC)


 * That Wikipedia is a boon to lazy students does not mean that serving as a reference for them is its primary purpose. As Guy said, a Wikibooks article would serve that purpose perfectly well, and is no different to update than this site is. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 20:27, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

its really hard to find the full instruction set
I haven't been able to find a source for the full instruction set. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wintersfire (talk • contribs) 16:45, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

MIPS Technologies moves to RISC-V
Maybe this news isn't as big as I think it is, but: Is MIPS Technologies moving away from MIPS, and is MIPS therefore (almost) dead? Mgnbar (talk) 17:07, 10 March 2021 (UTC)