MIPS

MIPS refers to both a company, and a series of CPU chips which are its main product.

The company

The company is MIPS Technologies, Inc., started as MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. in 1984, by a number of researchers from Stanford University who had been early members of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer movement.

They do not usually build and sell the chips themselves, but mainly license their designs to chip manufacturers and other OEM users.

The chips

The chips all implement the MIPS architecture, a RISC CPU design. In common with many RISC machines, MIPS is a load-store architecture.

There have been several generations; the first were all 32-bit, but recently 64-bit versions have been added to the line.