
Wave Computing Closes Its MIPS Open Initiative with Immediate Effect - johlo
https://www.hackster.io/news/wave-computing-closes-its-mips-open-initiative-with-immediate-effect-zero-warning-e88b0df9acd0
======
skissane
> Thus far, the company has not given a reason for the closure of the MIPS
> Open Initiative - nor explained why it has opted to do so with immediate
> effect, rather than giving those who had begun building around the
> architecture fair warning of its plans

It is disappointing when a company won't publicly explain the reasons behind
its decisions. It doesn't impress.

------
baybal2
They were a decade too late with their initiative.

And Mips-Imagination as a commercial entity was braindead. Look for stories of
them responding to sales calls after 1+ month.

Execution was below the sea level.

I can say the same of many other "Big Semi" that went nowhere in the last 5
years. They all had underperforming C-suites stuffed with overfed big name
executives.

~~~
exikyut
My horribly underinformed understanding is that MIPS was ultimately a, uh,
_baseline_ architecture design in terms of performance to power consumption,
particularly with respect to ARM's exponential progress post-iPhone.

The going-nowhere bureaucracy-heavy structure resonates with the impression I
got from reading this - I can't help but wonder if:

\- they brought in outside consultants to "strategize" how to respond to the
OpenPOWER / RISC-V "threat" (postulation: RISC-V put the frozen deer in front
of the headlights, while OpenPOWER was the foghorn that got them scrambling at
the last moment - in _any_ direction)

\- said consultant wanted to ensure they'd get paid (translation: knew they
were talking to a board that expected a yes-team), so simply coughed up
"modern/relevant industry standard" advice they (probably correctly) assumed
was expected of them: go open

\- the entire industry went "all _riiiiight_ , free MIPS!", and wasted no time
commercially optimizing around royalty-free licencing

\- MIPS' "overfed" (as you astutely put it) board suddenly saw all their
holidays and etcetera flying away

\- either this happened a while ago and the consultant said to hang on and it
backfired, or this just happened recently

\- _Exceptionally_ loud meetings (probably involving death threats) were had,
possibly angry and/or irrational "NO, WE ARE STOPPING THIS NOW" decisions were
made, and...

...welp.

Given MIPS' execution being "below sea level" (again, as you put it), I get
the impression the management had no resonance with the technical architecture
of what it was they were managing.

So, they couldn't move the innovation forward, only industrialize the process
of perpetuating what already existed.

Hence, going open without considering how to pull that off in a way that is
both financially strategic and brings the best out of the architecture.

And because they didn't understand the strengths of their architecture they
had no confidence/competence to execute properly in the first place,
anticipate the disaster in this approach, or handle it correctly.

</naive_anecdotal_theory>

------
duskwuff
Good lord. I couldn't come up with a better way of permanently destroying
trust in a company if I tried.

------
tyingq
Lasted less than a year.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701145)

------
justinjlynn
In addition to the fully open ISAs listed in the article (OpenSPARC and
RISC-V) the POWER ISA (of PowerPC origin) is also fully open. This is a
somewhat recent development.

------
happycube
We're still relevant, da... no, we're not.

~~~
tyingq
I believe lots of home routers still use them.

~~~
zmix
My Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-Lite does. The MIPS CPUs can have hardware offloading
for special network stuff, or so I have been told.

~~~
klagermkii
Yeah, MIPS was nice with allowing custom instructions to be added to their
cores, but with the relatively recent Arm licensing change for Armv8-M that
allows something similar I wonder if more will just switch to Arm.

[https://hackaday.com/2019/10/23/arm-allows-custom-
instructio...](https://hackaday.com/2019/10/23/arm-allows-custom-
instructions/)

~~~
zmix
Interesting. But, oh, the comments to that post...!

