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Comment by joveian | Hacker News Reader

MIPS is a really fun assembly language to learn IMO. I liked the book See MIPS Run by Dominic Sweetman.

I agree. I've been stopping and starting learning assembly for several years with x86. It didn't really gel but with the book above, the quizzes and exercises its really started to gel, even basic concepts such as nibbles, words, twos complement, etc. What's more I can actually make a lot more sense of low-level code for IA now, such as the simple kernel post recent, and boot loader in ASM.

For the more complex exercises, I've found writing a working program in C first to be beneficial. At first I used Emacs Lisp because its nice to write in Emacs, which I'm using along with the Assembly major mode. C has less of a cognitive shift during translation since its much closer to what you're working with.

In a stoic sort of way, I have a new appreciation for C and an even greater appreciation for lisp. This, however, has not interfered with my enjoyment of learning MIPS, which I'm deriding much of from this book.

I bought that once on a whim, when I worked a few blocks away from Powell's Technical Books, back when that was its own entity. Never really had the chance to do anything with it though.

What are MIPS processors used for these days?

Many wireless routers run a MIPS architecture, for one.

Vast majority of wifi routers use MIPS. I believe the Chinese longsoon processor is MIPS-derived as well.

A lot of routers still use MIPS, and a fair amount of special purpose embedded systems. I still have a few now somewhat aging MIPS SoC development boards from chumby, though we never put out a MIPS-based product.

Not a lot of general purpose use anymore since the golden age of the SGI/N64/PS2/PSP.

I have this vague recollection that for a while, MIPS was sort of in the running against ARM for more things, but has now been pretty much completely squeezed out of certain markets, like phones.

It wasn't really ever in the running for phones/tablets; there were some cheap no-name Chinese devices using MIPS early on but now they all use Rockchip or Mediatek SoCs. Imagination did buy MIPS with the stated goal of pushing into this market, but it's truly too late.

Really, the only growth left for MIPS is through China's government's technology independence initiative in developing the Loongson/Godson CPUs, for which they licensed MIPS. A Loongson powers the laptop that RMS uses.

China still has a MIPS programme, including supercomputers, and some PCs. But its pretty much all embedded elsewhere, especially routers.

As I understand it, a number of current digital camera processors use MIPS cores.

Apart from all the other stuff listed: Set-top boxes. The WDTV Live for example, uses a specialized tri-core Sigma Design MIPS CPU, where one of the selling points is that one of the cores can be locked down by the board manufacturer with the intent of e.g. running DRM stuff.

Just picked it off my Bookshelf, nostalgia..

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