Imagination Technology Buys MIPS 56
New submitter HalWasRight writes "After years of struggle, MIPS Technologies — the original RISC processor company — is being sold to Imagination Technologies, best known for its popular mobile GPUs. Part of the deal included MIPS divesting much of its non-processor related patents to a group that includes ARM. This deal could change the landscape in the battle for mobile sockets."
MIPS press release, Imagination press release.
Re:PowerPC (Score:2, Informative)
Think broader than PowerPC. If you include the entire Power architecture (PowerPC, Cell and POWER), you have a huge market, mostly through POWER. POWER is the dominant architecture in big iron. Keep in mind SPARC and Itanium are only picking up the odd discarded breadcrumbs from POWER and they're still (barely) managing to stay in the game. The POWER market is absolutely essential. Basically any task you have that can't be easily distributed over a couple hundred puny x86 stations, POWER is the first place you look.
Re:the original RISC? (Score:4, Informative)
D. A. Patterson and C. H. Sequin, "RISC I: A reduced instruction set VLSI computer," in Proc. 8th Annu. Symp. Comput. Architecture, Minneapolis, MN, May 1981, pp. 443-457.
The architectural principle is generally credited to John Cocke, on the IBM 801 minicomputer, though others published first. Some (like me) might argue it goes back to Seymour Cray's designs at Control Data for the CDC6600 PPU but those definitely did not have a minimal instruction set, just a small one with a 6-bit opcode field.