More On Mips

February 17, 2004

MIPS architecture

MIPS, an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, is a microprocessor architecture developed by MIPS Computer Systems Inc

The MIPS CPU family was one of the most successful and flexible CPU designs throughout the 1990s, and has found broad application in embedded systems, Windows CE devices, SGI workstations, and Cisco Internet routers. The Nintendo 64 video game console uses a 64-bit MIPS processor.

The MIPS CPU features a five-stage CPU pipeline to execute multiple instructions at the same time. The CPU has 32 registers, from which two serve special purposes, the rest being available to generic use, regulated through ABI conventions. Popular compilers that target the MIPS architecture include the MIPSPro Compiler and GCC.

Four backward-compatible revisions of the MIPS instruction set exist, named MIPS I to MIPS IV. Several "add-on" extensions are also available, including MIPS-3D which is a simple set of integer-based SIMD instruction set dedicated to common 3D tasks, MIPS16 which adds compression to the instruction stream to make programs take up less room, and the recent addition of MIPS MT, new multithreading additions to the system similar to HyperThreading in the latest Intel lineup.

Because the designers created such a clean instruction set (see Instructions), computer architecture courses in universities and technical schools often study the MIPS architecture. The design of the MIPS CPU family, together with SPARC, another early RISC architecture, greatly influenced later RISC designs like HP Precision Architecture and DEC Alpha.

The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit implementations (generally 32 bit wide registers and data paths), later versions were 64-bit implementations.

February 17, 2004

February 17, 2004

i know very little about what i posted, but what i do know, it is the base from the programing of hctp. i am trying to find the actual mips program so i can tear in to hctp. my thinking is that it will tell where and what everything is. like combining moves, and what parts of ram are being used for in game storage...