From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
MIPS architecture
is an
instruction set
for
computers
that was developed at
Stanford University
in 1981. At the start, MIPS was an acronym for
Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages
. Most of it is done in
RISC
. In a full RISC architecture, all commands have the same length. This simplifies the design of the
microchip
and allows to use fast clock cycles. At the start, the architecture used a 32 bit
bus
, but from 1991, a 64 bit architecture was used.
In 2015, MIPS implementations are primarily used in
embedded systems
such as
Windows CE
devices,
routers
,
residential gateways
, and
video game consoles
such as the
Nintendo 64
,
Sony
PlayStation
,
PlayStation 2
and
PlayStation Portable
. Until late 2006, they were also used in many of
SGI
's computer products. MIPS implementations were also used by
Digital Equipment Corporation
,
NEC
,
Pyramid Technology
,
Siemens Nixdorf
,
Tandem Computers
and others during the late 1980s and 1990s. In the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced was a MIPS implementation.
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