04 22 w 37.4201 n 122.0728 w 37.4201 ; 122.0728 this article s factual accuracy may be compromised due to out of date information . please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information . july 2014 mips technologies inc. type subsidiary industry risc microprocessors fate acquired in 2013 by imagination technologies founded 1984 ; 32 years ago 1984 headquarters sunnyvale california united states key people sandeep vij products semiconductor intellectual property number of employees 146 september 2010 parent imagination technologies website imgtec.com mips mips technologies inc. formerly mips computer systems inc. was a united states based fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the mips architecture and a series of risc cpu chips based on it . 1 2 mips provides processor architectures and cores for digital home networking embedded iot and mobile applications . 3 4 on 8 february 2013 mips technologies inc. was acquired by imagination technologies after ceva inc. pulled out of the bidding . imagination technologies is a uk based company best known for their powervr graphics processor family . 5 contents 1 history 1.1 company timeline 2 products 2.1 mips processor core families 3 licensees 4 operating systems 5 references 6 external links history edit mips computer systems inc. was founded in 1984 6 7 by a group of researchers from stanford university that included john l. hennessy one of the pioneers of the risc concept . other principal founders were skip stritter formerly a motorola technologist and john moussouris formerly of ibm . 8 the initial ceo was vaemond crane formerly president and ceo of computer consoles inc. who arrived in february 1985 and departed in june 1989 . he was replaced by bob miller a former senior ibm and data general executive . miller ran the company through its ipo and subsequent sale to silicon graphics . in 1988 mips computer systems designs were noticed by silicon graphics sgi and the company adopted the mips architecture for its computers . 9 a year later in december 1989 mips held its first ipo . that year digital equipment corporation dec released a unix workstation based on the mips design . after developing the r2000 and r3000 microprocessors a management change brought along the larger dreams of being a computer vendor . the company found itself unable to compete in the computer market against much larger companies and was struggling to support the costs of developing both the chips and the systems mips magnum . to secure the supply of future generations of mips microprocessors the 64 bit r4000 sgi acquired the company in 1992 10 for 333 million 11 12 and renamed it as mips technologies inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of sgi . 13 during sgi s ownership of mips the company introduced the r8000 in 1994 and the r10000 14 in 1996 and a follow up the r12000 in 1997 . 15 during this time two future microprocessors code named the beast and capitan were in development ; these were cancelled after sgi decided to migrate to the itanium architecture 16 in 1998 . 11 17 as a result mips was spun out as an intellectual property licensing company offering licences to the mips architecture as well as microprocessor core designs . on june 30 1998 mips held an ipo after raising about 16.3 million with an offering price of 14 a share . 9 18 19 in 1999 sgi announced it would overhaul its operations ; it planned to continue introducing new mips processors until 2002 but its server business would include intel s processor architectures as well . 20 sgi spun mips out completely on june 20 2000 by distributing all its interest as stock dividend to the stockholders . in early 2008 mips laid off 28 employees from its processor business group . on august 13 2008 mips announced a loss of 108.5 million for their fiscal fourth quarter and that they would lay off another 15 % of their workforce . at the time mips had 512 employees . 21 some notable people who worked in mips james billmaier 22 steve blank 23 joseph dinucci 24 john l. hennessy 25 david hitz 26 earl killian 27 28 dan levin 29 john mashey 30 john p. mccaskey bob miller 31 stratton sclavos . 32 and skip stritter . 33 board members included bill davidow . in 2010 sandeep vij was named ceo of mips technologies . 34 vij studied under dr. john hennessy as a stanford university grad student . 34 prior to taking over at mips vij was an executive at cavium networks 34 xilinx and altera . 35 ee times reported that mips had 150 employees as of november 1 2010 . 36 if the august 14th 2008 edn article 21 was accurate about mips having over 500 employees at the time then mips reduced their total workforce by 70 % between 2008 and 2010 . mips branding as used by imagination technologies in addition to its main r & d centre in sunnyvale california 37 mips has engineering facilities in shanghai china beaverton oregon bristol and kings langley both in england . 38 it also has offices in hsin chu taiwan ; tokyo japan ; remscheid germany and haifa israel . 39 during the first quarter of 2013 498 out of 580 of mips patents were sold to bridge crossing which was created by allied security trust with all processor specific patents and the other parts of the company sold to imagination technologies group . 40 imagination had outbid ceva inc to buy mips with an offer of 100 million 41 and is investing to develop the architecture for the embedded processor market . company timeline edit year 1981 dr. john hennessy at stanford university leads research in building a microprocessor using risc principles . 1984 mips computer systems inc. co founded by dr. john hennessy skip stritter and dr. john moussouris 42 1986 first product ships r2000 microprocessor unix workstation and optimizing compilers 1988 r3000 microprocessor 1989 first ipo in november as mips computer systems with bob miller as ceo 1991 r4000 microprocessor 1992 sgi acquires mips computer systems . transforms it into internal mips group and then incorporates and renames it to mips technologies inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of sgi 1994 r8000 microprocessor 1994 sony playstation released using an r3000 cpu with custom gte coprocessor 1996 r10000 microprocessor ; nintendo 64 released incorporating a cut down r4300 processor . 1998 re ipo as mips technologies inc 1999 sony playstation 2 released using an r5900 cpu with custom vector coprocessors 2002 acquires algorithmics ltd a uk based mips development hardware software and consultancy company . september 6 2005 acquires first silicon solutions fs2 a lake oswego oregon company as a wholly owned subsidiary . fs2 specializes in silicon ip design services and oci on chip instrumentation development tools for programming testing debug and trace of embedded systems in soc sopc fpga assp and asic devices . 2007 mips technologies acquires portugal based mixed signal intellectual property company chipidea february 2009 mips joins linux foundation 43 may 8 2009 chipidea is sold to synopsys . june 2009 android is ported to mips 44 september 30 2009 mips technologies joins the open handset alliance 45 january 2010 sandeep vij appointed as ceo 46 january 2011 mips introduces the first android mips based set top box at ces . 47 april 2011 mips technologies ports google s android 3.0 honeycomb to the mips architecture 48 49 august 2012 mips technologies ports google s android 4.1 jelly bean . with indian company karbonn mobiles announces world s second tablet running android 4.1 . 50 february 8 2013 mips technologies is sold to imagination technologies . 51 products edit main article list of mips microprocessor cores mips technologies created the processor architecture that is licensed to chip makers . 52 53 before the acquisition the company had 125 licensees who ship more than 500 million mips based processors each year . 54 mips processor architectures and cores are used in home entertainment 55 networking 56 and communications products . the company licensed its 32 and 64 bit architectures as well as 32 bit cores . 57 the mips32 architecture is a high performance 32 bit instruction set architecture isa that is used in applications such as 32 bit microcontrollers home entertainment home networking devices and mobile designs . 58 mips customers license the architecture to develop their own processors or license off the shelf cores from mips that are based on the architecture . 59 the mips64 architecture is a high performance 64 bit instruction set architecture that is widely used in networking infrastructure equipment through mips licensees such as cavium networks 60 and broadcom . 61 smartce connected entertainment is a reference platform that integrates android adobe flash platform for tv skype the home jinni connectv application and other applications . 62 63 smartce lets oem customers create integrated products more quickly . mips processor core families edit the mips processor cores are divided by imagination into three major families 64 warrior hardware virtualization hardware multi threading and simd 65 m class m5100 and m5150 66 m6200 and m6250 67 i class i6400 68 p class p5600 69 p6600 70 aptiv microaptiv compact real time embedded processor core interaptiv multiprocessor multi threaded core with a nine stage pipeline proaptiv super scalar deeply out of order processor core with high coremark mhz score 71 classic . 4k m14k 58 24k 72 34k 73 74k 74 1004k 75 multicore and multithreaded and 1074k superscalar and multithreaded families . licensees edit mips technologies had a strong customer licensee base in home electronics and portable media players ; for example 75 percent of blu ray disc players were running on mips technologies processors . 76 in the digital home the company s processors were predominantly found in digital tvs and set top boxes . 62 the sony playstation portable used two processors based on the mips32 4k processor . within the networking segment licensees include cavium networks and broadcom . 56 cavium has used up to 48 mips cores for its octeon family network reference designs . 77 broadcom ships linux ready mips64 based xlp xlr and xls multicore multithreaded processors . 78 licensees using mips to build smartphones and tablets include actions semiconductor and ingenic semiconductor . 79 tablets based on mips include the cruz tablets from velocity micro . 80 tcl corporation is using mips processors for the development of smartphones . 81 companies can also obtain an mips architectural licence for designing their own cpu cores using the mips instruction set . distinct mips architecture implementations by licensees include broadcom s brcm 5000 . other licensees include broadcom which has developed mips based cpus for over a decade 82 microchip technology which leverages mips processors for its 32 bit pic32 microcontrollers 83 qualcomm atheros mediatek and mobileye whose eyeq chips are based on cores licensed from mips . 84 operating systems edit mips is predominantly used in conjunction with android and linux operating systems . 85 there are also a few netbsd ports for mips . 86 google s processor agnostic 54 android operating system is built on the linux kernel . 87 mips originally ported android to its architecture for embedded products beyond the mobile handset where it was originally targeted by google . 88 in 2010 mips and its licensee sigma designs announced the world s first android set top boxes . 47 by porting to android mips processors power smartphones and tablets running on the android operating system . 89 openwrt is an embedded operating system based on the linux kernel . while it currently runs on a variety of processor architectures it was originally developed for the linksys wrt54g which used a 32 bit mips processor from broadcom . the openwrt table of hardware now includes mips based devices from atheros broadcom cavium lantiq mediatek etc. real