infoTECH Feature

October 16, 2014

MIPS Looks at Past and Future of 64-bit Architecture

While 64-bit processors are becoming ubiquitous in PCs, embedded systems and even mobile devices, they actually have a history of over 20 years. Imagination Technologies, one of the major 64-bit processor makers, has released a new variant of its MIPS64 architecture the MIPS I6400 processors.

Alexandru Voica wrote a blog post detailing the past and outlining the future of the architecture.

“The architecture has seen a continued evolution over time which has helped our partners maintain leadership in their established markets but also enter and proliferate across new ones,” he wrote. “64-bit MIPS CPUs have shipped in hundreds of millions of devices, from game consoles and set-top boxes to ultra-high performance networking equipment.”

The architecture made its debut in 1991 with the MIPS R4000, released when its developer, MIPS Technologies (News - Alert), was still a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics. The first 64-bit processor on the market was very popular in the workstation and server market, especially in SGI’s own line of graphics workstations.

The dinosaurs in the 1993 movie “Jurassic Park” were rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations.

The architecture has showed up in some surprising places—it powered the Nintendo 64 game console.

Silicon Graphics eventually faltered when graphics cards became ubiquitous on PCs and the market moved away from SGIs proprietary workstations and servers toward open source Linux solutions. MIPS was spun off into its own company and bought by Imagination Technologies (News - Alert).

The MIPS64 is no relic of the past. The architecture is continuously improved on. Features include a simplified instruction set, better performance, faster processors and the ability to handle more complex instructions.

It’s also an object lesson in how slowly some innovations can diffuse into the wider world. When the first 64-bit MIPS chip debuted, PC users thought 32-bit 386 and 486 processors were hot stuff, at least those enough lucky to have such powerful chips in their computers. The Pentium was still a few years away from showing up in PCs, and the Xeon was far beyond the horizon.

As applications get more demanding, the processors will continue to get smaller, faster and better thanks to Moore’s Law, which states that capacity of processors doubles about every 18 months.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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