But in recent months, MIPS related news has not been so good. First, Wave Computing decided to end MIPS Open Initiative in November 2019, then Paul Burton and Ralf Baechle removed themselves from the Linux kernel MIPS maintainer list in February 2020, as their work with MIPS ended leaving Thomas Bogendoerfer as the only maintainer.
But this month, things turned for the worse, with CIP United filing a lawsuit against MIPS LLC on April 6, before announcing the company had obtained exclusive MIPS license rights for mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau on April 11, 2019 (Click on News in top menu of this link).
In my mind, I had written off MIPS as a thing of the past anyway – but it’s still sad to see if tangled up in legal disputes and lack of attention.
Maybe I misunderstand this news, but in the Netherlands and Germany these routers are *very* common as it’s what major ISPs provide:
root@fritz:/var/mod/root# uname -a
Linux fritz.box 3.10.107 #1 SMP Tue Jul 16 15:18:31 CEST 2019 mips GNU/Linux
There are barely ARM-based routers. It seems unlikely MIPS could just die with so many routers SoCs based on it. Maybe this is not about that?
These MIPS32 cores are immensely popular in these cheap set-up boxes and residential gateways because nearly every model of Qualcomm Atheros and Broadcom BCM are indeed MIPS microcontrollers. They are also have massive footprint in small embedded market with PIC32 from Microchip.
I don’t believe this architecture will die. Someone will purchase the IP and keep going on. MIPS always filled that market where ARM is just too costly, even those M0 ones.
Problem to remember here is MIPS32 is no longer the only option. Lot of places that would have historically used a MIPS32 we are now seeing risc-v. So it could die.
This begs the quwstion of the future of Fuloong and Linlong Procs
Oh, because China cares about western copyright ?
They did enough to license the MIPS ISA
Heh, Wave computing purchased them.
https://www.mips.com/press/wave-computing-extends-ai-lead-by-targeting-edge-of-cloud-through-acquisition-of-mips/