
Great MIPS chips of the past 30 years - alexvoica
http://www.alexvoica.com/great-mips-chips-of-the-past-30-years/
======
rwmj
Unless you were doing 3D graphics, SGI computers of the 1990s were overpriced.
At my first startup in 1997 we benchmarked SGI and Suns against PCs of the
time, and found white-box PCs offered a clear 3 x price/performance advantage.
So we kitted out our test network and datacenter with racks of white-box PCs
(literally desktop PCs, not even server hardware).

I still have no idea what the advantage of Sun hardware was supposed to be,
except some people were locked in, either by software or some kind of
Stockholm syndrome.

Edit: Photo of our test network:
[http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/testbed.jpg](http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/testbed.jpg)

~~~
hga
We've been told that the 1988 Sun 386i was quite successful due to its ability
to run MS-DOS, and that the Sun 486i was canceled in 1990 because it was
faster than the in-house SPARC equivalents. But it took some time for Intel
machines to be competitive "big iron", say starting in the 486 days? Including
running a serious UNIX(TM) or Linux. ADDED: and serious I/O, we needed EISA
and then PCI and its descendants.

So by 1997 Sun and SGI had first mover advantages, but neither being well run
companies they squandered them even before counting Intel's general excellence
in microarchitectures and fabrication. (Plus wasn't SPARC hard to make fast
due to an architectural mistake?)

One other problem SGI had, their IRIX was a notorious nightmare, which is part
of their not being a well run company. Sun also lost more than a little
momentum when they switched from BSD to ATT UNIX(TM), and did brain dead
marketing where they boasted their UNIX(TM) was less buggy than Windows NT at
a time when that simply wasn't true (and if I recall that was at a time they
were too often refusing to fix some bugs).

A thesis I've just developed here is that the switch to commodity Intel
hardware decoupled hardware and software, they helped you avoid getting locked
into a single vendor's mistakes (and AMD helped when Intel faltered in several
ways). And open source software provided you many mechanisms to get your
critical bugs fixed.

~~~
aswanson
How did the management at two successful companies that had delivered great
products for a long period of time get so shitty so fast?

~~~
SixSigma
By trying to beat MicroSoft rather than servicing customer needs.

~~~
hga
That would be Sun, right? Particularly Scott McNealy:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft](https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft)
(not needed SGI's special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with
Sun and DEC).

In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of
are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an
off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would
try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM
chips for their non-fault tolerant design. Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos
of fixing the customer's problem.

Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved
them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales. If you weren't
making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were
sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn't give you the time
of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with
companies that bought one or two Sun workstations. Adding a web site that
allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound.

What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could
charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who's
machines weren't as good, but had the strange property of being willing and
able to sell them (HP's sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a
big player here). So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell
servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough.
So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales.

A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their
systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel
controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one. And I read that
Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the
lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).

~~~
the_why_of_y
> their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an
> off-CPU chip cache design

Yeah, that one was a huge. Sourcing those cache chips from IBM, and just
trusting them not to knowingly supply ones that emit radioactive radiation was
such an amateur move.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-
hardwa...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-
hardware/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-server-memory-flaws.html)
[http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO66102,00.html)

~~~
hga
It's inevitable, the only question is at what rate the materials in your chips
will emit them, and what are the consequences. Smart companies spend a little
extra for parity/EEC, they don't blame their customers for machine room
environmental non-optimality unless they're _really_ sure that's the problem.
He also didn't deny the "sign the NDA if you want us to (pretend to) address
the problem".

Bottom line, he and Sun didn't own the problem, didn't take care of their
customers until too much bad PR was generated, and again dealt with it at
least as much as a PR problem for Sun than as a problem for their customers.

A bad idea when there are other companies out there offering better enterprise
level stuff. Or as a DEC book put it, looking back on the frothy '70s
minicomputer market, the companies that won did an _adequate_ job of
_everything_ , didn't drop the ball on any of the essential things like
documentation and support. Certainly no one bought DEC equipment for their
disk drives....

------
niklasni1
> R3000 sold extremely well (over 1 million units were produced).

Although I know it's not directly comparable, I was at an ST event recently,
and the representative said they were making one million STM32 ARM
microcontrollers per day.

~~~
alexvoica
I know, we've shipped about 800 million MIPS CPUs in the last year alone.

But for that time in history, a million processors was a big milestone. You
also have to remember that in 1988 MIPS was a three-year old company battling
established vendors.

~~~
axeldeboer
> You also have to remember that in 1988 MIPS was a three-year old company
> battling established vendors.

And 10 years after that MIPS has become an embittered outcast, trying to sue
potential partners into the ground [0].

Luckily, after yet another 10 years MIPS has grown up and started acting
somewhat sensibly [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexra)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#MIPS_patent_issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#MIPS_patent_issues)

~~~
alexvoica
Both MIPS and ARM sell CPU IP therefore I'm sure anyone here can dig up
several examples of patent infringements that ended up in court.

I think what sets us apart from the competition is the fact that a MIPS CPU is
now completely open and free for university use, including production-quality
Verilog code and tools from Xilinx.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9194/imagination-announces-
fre...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9194/imagination-announces-free-
mipsfpga-design-for-academia)

~~~
axeldeboer
It takes quite some big brass b^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PR skills to downplay Lexra
disaster that (together with market crash and other events around year 2000)
costed MIPS itself quite dearly in both money directly and more importantly in
market position. Need I remind you that was right around the time of ARM's
spectacular rise: Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this
litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat:
ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm. Only burgeoning xDSL market
(and good availability of established binary-only MIPS codebase for it) that
saved MIPS in early 2000s.

Not to mention quite egregious fact-twisting I see in your reply on two
counts: First, that wasn't really a "patent infringement" \- first lawsuit was
about trademark infringement - which Lexra arguably was guilty of, but quickly
backpedaled, at which point case felt apart. Then MIPS, unhappy with that
outcome, launched second, even bigger lawsuit that was technically about
patent infringement, but Lexra never actually used the patent in question, and
specifically marketed their design as free from lwl/r and swl/r instructions,
making the whole thing a theater of absurd going on for years where plaintiff
was alleging that Lexra was was yes, not implenting those instructions, but
somehow facilitating their clients' emulating those. Hardly that can be called
"ended up in court". Whopsie-daisy... "ended up", right...

Providing official Verilog code for an older MIPS core is certainly a massive
feat and deserve an applause, but then again there are plenty of other HDL
implementations of CPU cores around, MIPS ISA cores included [0]. And patent
law have a safe haven for academia [1], so "completely open and free for
university use" is just hot air, sorry. Still, it's "official", so there's
value in that, of course.

[0] [http://opencores.org/project,ion](http://opencores.org/project,ion) [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption)

~~~
alexvoica
I wasn't around to witness the Lexra situation so I can't/won't contradict
your observations.

However, I think there are a few other reasons why MIPS did not ride the wave
of mobile like ARM did.

First of all, MIPS Technologies acquired mixed-signal design house Chipidea
for $147m and then sold it to Synopsys for $22m after a rocky two-year
integration process.

Secondly, MIPS management focused on markets like networking and home
entertainment (set-top boxes, digital TVs, etc.) which did not enjoy the
explosive growth of mobile.

To address the second part of your comment about MIPSfpga, this is not "an
older core". It is a current-generation CPU capable of running Linux. It is
used today in the Microchip PIC32 and the Samsung Artik 1 MCUs - two products
that were released within the last year. Furthermore, most of these open cores
implement MIPS III or IV architectures from two decades ago whereas MIPSfpga
is MIPS32 Release 3. In addition, MIPSfpga implements industry-standard
interfaces which make the core much easier to use on an FPGA.

------
saganus
Wow, what does an HP LJ4000 laser printer need a processor that's also used in
an SGI workstation for?

I looked into the Wikipedia article and although it's a big printer, I don't
really understand how does it compare to a workstation's performance.

~~~
linuxlizard
Probably Postscript and PCL rendering in firmware. Requires a lot of memory
and CPU. Current printers use custom ASICs with specialized rendering
hardware.

------
gcb0
i can't stop laughing at that article.

> Even though these days MIPS is best defined by the low-power [...] all
> desktop and server processors released since the 1990s have borrowed heavily
> from many of the energy-saving RISC philosophies introduced three decades
> ago.</blockquote>

maybe the CPU itself was power efficient, but the actual machines from SGI
were _far_ from it.

for example, nekochan is the de-facto forum for sgi/irix for a long time. here
is someone begging to give away a onyx2 (top of the line, latest model, R12k
sgi powerhorse) because they moved to a new office and didn't have a wimpy
250V 60A outlet laying around on the new place

[http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?t=16720600](http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?t=16720600)

> [...] our move to a new office. Since we have moved here we don't have
> enough power to test it as it requires 60 amps at 250v (2 30 amp 230v
> connectors).[...] The current offer is 250$ and pickup.</blockquote> \---
> 2009!

------
to3m
I wonder how many other CPUs are named after an extremely useful thing they
_don 't_ have.

~~~
alexvoica
I think the original intention of the Stanford group was to highlight
pipelining, so the "without interlocked" aspect should be seen in that context
and not interpreted literally.

Until the late 1980s pipelining had been drastically underexploited by both
CISC and RISC architectures.

------
kjs3
No R8000? Odd, multi-chip "FP performance at all costs" variant used in some
of the SGI Power series. Made SGI a legitimate supercomputer vendor for a
couple of years.

~~~
alexvoica
I left out R8000 because it was used only for a short period of time and in a
limited range of systems.

~~~
kjs3
I get it, but it really did make MIPS an undisputed scientific computing
beast. Probably I just have a soft spot for it as it was the chip that made me
really understand that we'd be able to do what was once considered
supercomputer-only tasks on something that was from a budget perspective a
departmental or even workstation platform.

