Question

I’ve been programming for x86 & x86-64 in assembly language for few months. Now, I want to move on to some different kind of processors.

MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, Itanium, ARM of these I found ARM is being widely use. But the books I see that tutorials & books teach about MIPS more than all these other architectures.

Why is MIPS so popular? Are MIPS processors still in use? Which architecture should I go for?

My background:

I’m a student in Electronics dept. I’m also a high level programmer.

Answer 1

Cavium Networks and Raza Microelectronics Broadcom are two large MIPS chipmakers. See MIPS Imagination Technologies’ website for more info.

One thing that MIPS does and ARM doesn’t is 64-bit.

Update as of 2013: Broadcom does not appear to have introduced new MIPS products since 2006, and Cavium appears to be transitioning to 64-bit ARM v8. Imagination Technologies acquired MIPS in late 2012. (Ironically, Apple, their #1 customer, were the first to market with ARM v8.)

The writing is on the wall for MIPS.

---

MIPS is the cleanest successful RISC. PowerPC and (32-bit) ARM have so many extra instructions (even a few operating modes, 32-bit ARM especially) that you could almost call them CISC. SPARC has a few odd features and Itanium is composed entirely of odd features. The latter two are more dead than MIPS.

So if you learn MIPS, you will be able to transfer 100% of that knowledge to other RISCs (give or take delay slots), but you still have to learn about lots of odd instructions on PPC, a whole ton-o-junk on 32-bit ARM, and register windows on SPARC. Itanium isn’t RISC so it’s hard to say anything, besides don’t learn Itanium.

I have not studied 64-bit ARM yet but it is likely to have most of the positive qualities of MIPS, being essentially a clean-slate design.