Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:51:20 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:43:53 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
 

[MIPS] has been abandoned and replaced by RISC-V several years ago.
 

 
I’m not so sure the MIPS architecture has been “abandoned”. Last I
heard, it was still shipping hundreds of millions of chips per year.

Care to point to the source of this claim? Two main suppliers of MIPS
silicon in this century are Microchip and Cavium (now owned by Marvell).

According to my understanding Microchip's MIPS-based PIC32 line was
never as popular as their other offerings.

In case of Marvell, I no longer see MIPS-based Octeon III chips in the
product section of their Web site. Which, I'd guess, means that in order
to buy one you has to be an existing customer.  Since the market that
Octeon III was playing in, is rather dynamic, I don't expect that those
existing customers buy very old chips in tens of millions. Likely not
even in single-digit millions.

Also those Chinese supers run LoongArch, which is some sort of MIPS
derivative.
>

Sort of.
And majority of my FPGA designs run Nios2 soft cores that are also
'sort of MIPS'. But they are *not* MIPS.

It is true that there is no more money to be made from licensing any
“MIPS IP”, which is why Imagination Tech, the inheritors of whatever
was left of MIPS the commercial operation, have switched to being a
RISC-V-centric company now.