MIPS Technologies ceases development of the MIPS architecture and switches to building systems based on the RISC-V architecture. The eighth generation of the MIPS architecture was decided to build on the developments of the open RISC-V project.
In 2017, MIPS Technologies was taken over by Wave Computing, a startup that makes machine learning accelerators using MIPS processors. Last year, Wave Computing entered bankruptcy proceedings, but a week ago, with the participation of the Tallwood venture capital fund, it emerged from bankruptcy, reorganized and was reborn under a new name - MIPS. The new company MIPS has completely changed the business model and will not be limited to processors.
In the past, MIPS Technologies has been involved in architecture development and intellectual property licensing related to MIPS processors, outside of direct manufacturing. The new company will produce chips, but based on the RISC-V architecture. MIPS and RISC-V are similar in concept and philosophy, but RISC-V is developed by the non-profit RISC-V International with community input. MIPS decided not to continue developing its own architecture, but to join the collaboration. It is noteworthy that MIPS Technologies has long been a member of RISC-V International, and the CTO of RISC-V International is a former employee of MIPS Technologies.
Recall that RISC-V provides an open and flexible system of machine instructions that allows you to create microprocessors for arbitrary applications, without requiring royalties and without imposing conditions on use. RISC-V allows the creation of completely open SoCs and processors. Currently, based on the RISC-V specification, various companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) are developing several dozen variants of microprocessor cores, SoCs, and already manufactured chips. RISC-V support has been present since the releases of Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and Linux kernel 4.15.
Source: opennet.ru