MIPS Goes Open Source, Challenges Arm and RISC-V

MIPS has had a long, strange trip over the past few decades, from when the silicon technology was first used by Silicon Graphics in the mid-1980s to build the first multiprocessor server. Since then it has been bought by SGI, which spun it out in the late 1990s when Intel-based servers began to dominate the market.Imagination Technologies bought MIPS in 2013 and then sold it to Tallwood Capital four years later. In June 2018, Wave Computing, which builds silicon and appliances optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning workloads in the data center, bought MIPS Tech. Throughout its journey, the MIPS instruction set has morphed from a data center silicon technology to one more commonly found in smaller, highly power-efficient embedded systems, such as internet of things (IoT) devices. Wave officials saw MIPS as a tool for expanding its reach beyond the data center and into these fast-growing areas at the edge.