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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:40:23 +0200
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On 11/09/2024 10:54, Michael S wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:51:20 -0000 (UTC)
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:43:53 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>>
>>> [MIPS] has been abandoned and replaced by RISC-V several years ago.
>>>   
>>
>> I’m not so sure the MIPS architecture has been “abandoned”. Last I
>> heard, it was still shipping hundreds of millions of chips per year.
> 
> Care to point to the source of this claim? Two main suppliers of MIPS
> silicon in this century are Microchip and Cavium (now owned by Marvell).
> 
> According to my understanding Microchip's MIPS-based PIC32 line was
> never as popular as their other offerings.

IMHO a major reason for that is Microchip's insane licensing policy for 
their development tools - although their compilers are just a minor 
modification of standard gcc, you have to pay huge amounts if you want 
to use the full features of the compiler.  (At least now you can enable 
/some/ optimisation without a paid license.)  It is not even possible to 
see from the release notes or documentation what version of gcc is 
provided, though my guess is that it is pretty old (the documentation 
describes "-std" options up to C++14).

The other reason, of course, was the name - "PIC" is associated with 
brain-dead microcontrollers with terrible C tools and which many people 
program in assembly.  They are also renowned for being very solid, 
coming in relatively amateur-friendly packages, and for never going out 
of production.

For some time now, Microchip's PIC32 line has all had ARM Cortex-M cores 
in new devices, based on SAM parts they got when they purchased Atmel. 
But they still sell the existing MIPS microcontrollers.

> 
> Sort of.
> And majority of my FPGA designs run Nios2 soft cores that are also
> 'sort of MIPS'. But they are *not* MIPS.

I thought the NIOS 2 was more "MIPS inspired" than "sort of MIPS".  (And 
the original NIOS was "SPARC inspired.)  They have now jumped to NIOS V, 
which is RISC-V (actual RISC-V).