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After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2022, they invested in the compages and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the auction of MIPS — and itself — to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2022. Now, the visitor has been brought dorsum to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.

Back in the 1990s, MIPS was the basis for a line of workstation hardware and devices like the PlayStation (R3000), Nintendo 64, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 2. Fifty-fifty after the company's hardware had vanished from high-end workstation systems, it held a hefty share of the embedded market, with myriad depression-power processors built by a wide range of companies. Subsequently Imagination Technologies acquired the company they attempted to apply it to compete with ARM, without much success. Now that the visitor has been picked upwardly by Tallwood Venture Capital, information technology's hoping to return to its roots and shift away from caput-to-head competition with ARM.

Majid Bemanian, MIPS manager of marketing, recently spoke with EETimes about the company's transformation. Noting that engineers at the company felt they had lost their heritage at Imagination Technologies, there are fresh hopes that MIPS can deliver a better production today.

"Nosotros know MIPS has then much to offering in terms of real-time support, multithreaded architecture and virtualization, in addition to functional safety and security," Bemanian said.

p6600-block-diagram

Under Imagination, MIPS put endeavour into its ain high-finish CPU cores like the P6600 above, but these fries won little market share.

It's going to be an upward climb. MIPS has lost ground to ARM, and the latter has non stood however. ARM at present offers a huge range of cadre licenses, with CPUs to address nigh every market segment. Newer ISAs, like RISC-V, are also open source and could compete with MIPS for market share at a time the company tin ill afford the fight. MIPS has landed a few major customers, however, including MobilEye, MediaTek (MIPS CPUs are used in the company'due south LTE modems), and Denso, a major Japanese automotive visitor.

According to Bemanian, MIPS strengths are in its multi-cache coherent architecture and highly efficient operations. "MIPS can be a part of inference engines or information technology can be used to manage accelerators around GPUs and FPGAs also," Bemanian told EETimes.

It tin can be. It remains to exist seen if it will be. AI and the appearance of deep neural networks, car vision, and other new devices definitely opens upwardly new markets for current and future players. Only MIPS will have to scramble to catch upward with the entrenched players, manufacture titans, and first-movers who accept already leaped to catch the proverbial train. MIPS will have to prove some compelling designs to win markets back from companies who've already jumped send. MIPS has already won an HPC customer — the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the TOP500 uses an SoC developed by Pezy Computing. The Pezy-SC2 SoC (shown in our feature paradigm) uses a MIPS P6600 cluster to manage its many-core architecture.