After losing its contract to supply graphics technology for use in Apple’s iPhones, Imagination Technologies put itself up for sale last year, and eventually split the company up, with Tallwood buying Imagination’s MIPS CPU design division and Canyon Bridge buying the rest of the company.
Then Tallwood put MIPS up for sale again, and this time it’s being acquired by California-based Wave Computing.
MIPS processors aren’t as well known as chips based on ARM or x86 designs. But MIPS architecture has been around for more than 3 decades and chips based on the technology are used in routers and other IoT devices.
In the past, MIPS-based chips have been used in video game consoles, personal computers, and servers. But the latest MIPS chips aren’t particularly competitive in those spaces.
Wave Computing is focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and says the acquisition of MIPS will help “accelerate Wave’s strategy of offering AI acceleration from the Datacenter to the Edge of Cloud by extending the company’s products beyond AI systems to now also include AI-enabled embedded solutions.”
With Google on generation 3 of their TPU, it looks like they two orders of magnitude ahead of other machine learning processors. Wave boasts 2.9 petaops… Google appears to be over 100 for the same size.
Maybe self driving cars will be able to connect to the cloud and coordinate their driving during rush hour.
Just like supercomputing, it has very limited applications.
What is the use of MIPS?? Just about nobody develops for it anymore
People would be more likely to develop for it if it were used in something they cared about.
I would think that’s the real issue.
IoT. Low power consumption.
Last I checked, MIPS is still used in some industrial applications as well as a lot of NASA probes.