MIPS
MIPS was commercialized in 1985 from John Hennessy’s Stanford project, and for a while it was everywhere that needed clean RISC: Silicon Graphics workstations, DEC systems, the Nintendo 64 and the first two PlayStations. The workstations went; the network gear stayed. Today the practical way to touch MIPS is a router — MediaTek’s MT76xx parts on the 32-bit side, Cavium’s multi-core Octeon processors on the 64-bit, big-endian side — usually running OpenWrt or another embedded Linux.
Both endiannesses exist in the wild, which is precisely what makes the architecture useful in a lab: big-endian MIPS64 is one of the few cheap ways left to catch byte-order bugs on real hardware.
In this family
mips— the 32-bit line, little-endian in most consumer parts.mips64— the 64-bit line; Octeon network processors run it big-endian.
In the lab
- Onion Omega2 Pro A small MIPS board built around the MediaTek MT7688.
- Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway A gateway appliance used here as a MIPS64 host (Cavium Octeon).