ARM vs MIPS


in3D

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I've been wondering a lot about this. Why does ARM seem to be winning? Why was MIPS common both in mobile AND home consoles? What put MIPS behind?
 
Price/performance, probably - MIPS was not so cheap, at least that's the impression I had. MIPS came from super-computer technology in the first place, while ARM started for small, low-powered devices.
 
ARM was always much more common in mobiles, going all the way back to the old Newtons and first iPod, and it was very big in PocketPCs and cell phones long before they had the big app ecosystem they have today. Starting bigger they just had more momentum, and as a unified software platform became more important that dominance continued.


So I'm not sure it's that ARM overtook MIPS in the markets where it was big, but rather those markets got stomped out by other ones, like smart phones and tablets beating out PMPs and PocketPCs. You might be thinking PSP, but that was probably more influenced by Sony's past licensing experience on PS1 and PS2. And MIPS didn't migrate to ARM on consoles but to PPC. The reason for that is obvious: it was advantageous to move to IBM for manufacturing and the easiest solution from there was to use an IBM CPU core. Besides, there's nothing really competitive in the high end for MIPS anymore.


There's still some movement in mobiles for MIPS, like for instance Ingenic's SoCs. A lot of Chinese handhelds use them, like the Dingoo and the upcoming GCW will too.
 
Not just the psp, so many portables used to have NEC cpus, which are mips. It must have been convenient for devrs back then, with mips dominating portables and home consoles, they would have had to do half the work!
 
NEC has made lots of CPUs which aren't MIPS. Which substantial portable market did MIPS dominate exactly, and when? Even claiming that they dominated the console market is a bit of a stretch.. having a win in 2/3 consoles in a generation still loses to PowerPC having wins in all three consoles this generation.
 
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Wow.. now that I'm looking more closely, I guess it never really beat 68k or PPC or ARM... I thought the whole 5th generation was mips but it was really just n64 and PlayStation. Maybe because so many consoles then had nec cpus, I just assumed that they were mips.
 
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