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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

Many wireless routers run a MIPS architecture, for one.

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

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