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MIPS Architecture
MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, Inc. developed by MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies, based in the United States. There are multiple versions of MIPS, including MIPS I, II, III, IV, and V, as well as five releases of MIPS32/64 (for 32- and 64-bit implementations, respectively). The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit; 64-bit versions were developed later. As of April 2017, the current version of MIPS is MIPS32/64 Release 6. MIPS32/64 primarily differs from MIPS I–V by defining the privileged kernel mode System Control Coprocessor in addition to the user mode architecture. The MIPS architecture has several optional extensions: MIPS-3D, a simple set of floating-point SIMD instructions dedicated to 3D computer graphics; MDMX (MaDMaX), a more extensive i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIPS Technologies
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American Fabless semiconductor company, fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of Reduced instruction set computer, RISC Central processing unit, CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides Microprocessor, processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications. MIPS was founded in 1984 to commercialize the work being carried out at Stanford University on the MIPS architecture, a pioneering RISC design. The company generated intense interest in the late 1980s, seeing design wins with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Silicon Graphics (SGI), among others. By the early 1990s the market was crowded with new RISC designs and further design wins were limited. The company was purchased by SGI in 1992, by that time its only major customer, and won several new designs in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multithreading (computer Architecture)
In computer architecture, multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) (or a single core in a multi-core processor) to provide multiple threads of execution. Overview The multithreading paradigm has become more popular as efforts to further exploit instruction-level parallelism have stalled since the late 1990s. This allowed the concept of throughput computing to re-emerge from the more specialized field of transaction processing. Even though it is very difficult to further speed up a single thread or single program, most computer systems are actually multitasking among multiple threads or programs. Thus, techniques that improve the throughput of all tasks result in overall performance gains. Two major techniques for throughput computing are ''multithreading'' and ''multiprocessing''. Advantages If a thread gets a lot of cache misses, the other threads can continue taking advantage of the unused computing resources, which may lead to faster overall exe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Effect Design
Quantum Effect Devices, Inc. (QED), was a microprocessor design company incorporated in 1991 as Quantum Effect Design. It was based in Palo Alto, California. History The three founders, Tom Riordan, Earl Killian and Ray Kunita, were senior managers at MIPS Computer Systems Inc. They left MIPS at a time when the company was having a difficult time selling entire computer systems ( MIPS Magnum) instead of concentrating on building microprocessor chips which was MIPS' original mission. Soon after, SGI purchased MIPS. IDT was a major funder and customer for the initial QED design. Business The original product plan for QED was to build a MIPS microprocessor for a laptop computer. This was during the ACE initiative from Microsoft to support multiple RISC architectures for their new Windows NT operating system. System companies like DeskStation Technology and board companies like ShaBLAMM! Computer were building products in the hope that RISC-based personal computers would become ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California, in November 1981 by James H. Clark, the computer scientist and entrepreneur perhaps best known for founding Netscape (with Marc Andreessen). Its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time. Early systems were based on the RealityEngine, Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had developed at Stanford University, and were derived from Clark's broader background in computer graphics. The Geometry Engine was the first very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation of a geometry pipeline, specialized hardware that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations needed to display three-dimensional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced RISC Computing
Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) is a specification promulgated by a defunct consortium of computer manufacturers (the Advanced Computing Environment project), setting forth a standard MIPS RISC-based computer hardware and firmware environment. The firmware on Alpha machines that are compatible with ARC is known as AlphaBIOS, non-ARC firmware on Alpha is known as SRM. History Although ACE went defunct, and no computer was ever manufactured which fully complied with the ARC standard, the ARC system has a widespread legacy in that all operating systems in the Windows NT family use ARC conventions for naming boot devices. SGI's modified version of the ARC firmware is named ARCS. All SGI computers which run IRIX 6.1 or later, such as the Indy and Octane, boot from an ARCS console, which uses the same drive naming conventions as Windows. Most of the various RISC-based computers designed to run Windows NT have versions of the ARC boot console to boot NT. These include the followin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Computing Environment
The Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform, the successor to personal computers based on Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture. The effort found little support in the market and dissolved due to infighting within the group and a lack of sales. History Formation The consortium was announced on the 9th of April 1991 by Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Although the consortium's definition of the Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) specification, indicating the details of an "open and scalable" hardware platform based on the MIPS architecture, was a significant focus of the initiative, the "key force" behind it was said to be Compaq recognising that it needed to pursue a strategy with MIPS in order to compete in the emerging personal workstation market. A week prior to the ACE announcement, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
R4000
The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implements the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III implementation. In the early 1990s, when RISC microprocessors were expected to replace CISC microprocessors such as the Intel i486, the R4000 was selected to be the microprocessor of the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE), an industry standard that intended to define a common RISC platform. ACE ultimately failed for a number of reasons, but the R4000 found success in the workstation and server markets. Models There are three configurations of the R4000: the R4000PC, an entry-level model with no support for a secondary cache; the R4000SC, a model with secondary cache but no multiprocessor capability; and the R4000MC, a model with secondary cache and support for the cache coherency protocols required by multiprocessor systems. Descriptio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Embedded System
An embedded system is a specialized computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including electrical or electronic hardware and mechanical parts. Because an embedded system typically controls physical operations of the machine that it is embedded within, it often has real-time computing constraints. Embedded systems control many devices in common use. , it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors manufactured were used in embedded systems. Modern embedded systems are often based on microcontrollers (i.e. microprocessors with integrated memory and peripheral interfaces), but ordinary microprocessors (using external chips for memory and peripheral interface circuits) are also common, especially in more complex systems. In either case, the processor(s) us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bipolar Integrated Technology
Bipolar Integrated Technology, Inc. (BIT), later Bit, Inc., was a privately held semiconductor company based in Beaverton, Oregon, which sold products implemented with emitter-coupled logic technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former Floating Point Systems, Intel, and Tektronix engineers. The company, which occupied a 46,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at the Oregon Graduate Center, raised $36 million in start-up capital within three years of its foundation. The initial product was a Floating-point arithmetic, floating-point co-processor chipset. Later, the company produced the B5000 SPARC ECL microprocessor (never reached production in a Sun Microsystems product, though used by Floating Point Systems). They also produced the R6000 MIPS architecture, MIPS ECL microprocessor, which did reach production as a MIPS minicomputer. Initial Device yield, yields of the R6000 were very poor, leading to parts shortages for MIPS Computer Systems; the latter company attr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
R6000
The R6000 is a microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS II instruction set architecture (ISA). The chip set consisted of the R6000 microprocessor, R6010 floating-point unit and R6020 system bus controller. The R6000 was the first implementation of the MIPS II ISA. The R6000 was implemented with emitter-coupled logic (ECL). In the mid- to late 1980s, the trend was to implement high-end microprocessors with high-speed logic such as ECL. As MIPS was a fabless company, the R6000 chip set was Semiconductor device fabrication, fabricated by Bipolar Integrated Technology (BIT) who had acted as a foundry for MIPS since November 1989. However, manufacturing issues that had caused "sporadic deliveries" of the R6000 to MIPS Computer Systems resulted in contractual restrictions being imposed on BIT, preventing the company from supplying other potential customers. Such issues, which had persisted for over a year, were reportedly resolved in 1991, en ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
R2000 (microprocessor)
The R2000 is a 32-bit microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in January 1986, it was, by a few months, the first commercial implementation of a RISC architecture. The R2000 competed with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputers and with Motorola 68020 and Intel Corporation 80386 microprocessors. R2000 users included Ardent Computer, DEC, Silicon Graphics, Northern Telecom and MIPS's own Unix workstations. The chip set consisted of the R2000 microprocessor, R2010 floating-point accelerator, and four R2020 write buffer chips. The core R2000 chip executed all non-floating-point instructions with a simple short pipeline. This chip also controlled the external code and data caches, made of fast standard SRAM chips organized with direct indexing and one-cycle read latency. The R2000 chip contained a small translation lookaside buffer for mapping virtual memory addresses. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIPS Computer Systems
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications. MIPS was founded in 1984 to commercialize the work being carried out at Stanford University on the MIPS architecture, a pioneering RISC design. The company generated intense interest in the late 1980s, seeing design wins with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Silicon Graphics (SGI), among others. By the early 1990s the market was crowded with new RISC designs and further design wins were limited. The company was purchased by SGI in 1992, by that time its only major customer, and won several new designs in the game console space. In 1998, SGI announced they would be transitioning off MIPS and spun off the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
