MIPS Technologies

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MIPS Technologies, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC CPUs.

MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was founded in 1984 by a group of researchers from Stanford University that included John L. Hennessy, as a vendor of microprocessor chips.

MIPS made its first initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq in November 1989 (after which it was acquired by SGI, spun-off, then IPOed again in 1998).

After being successful in the chip market with the R2000 and R3000 devices, a management change brought along the larger dreams of being a computer vendor. The company found itself unable to compete in the computer market against much larger companies and was struggling to support the costs of developing both the chips and the systems (MIPS Magnum). In order to secure the supply of future generations of MIPS microprocessors (the 64bit R4000), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $333 million and ran it as MIPS Technologies Inc. (MTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI.

After SGI decided to migrate to the Itanium architecture in the mid-1990s, it was decided to spin out MTI as an intellectual property licensing company offering licences to the MIPS architecture as well as microprocessor core designs. MTI made an IPO on June 30, 1998, i.e. it was no longer wholly owned by SGI since the IPO. SGI spun it off completely on June 20, 2000 by distributing all its interest as stock dividend to the stock holders.

Shares of the company are publicly traded on NASDAQ with the symbols MIPS .

[edit] Company timeline

1981: Dr. John Hennessy at Stanford University lead a team initiates the MIPS RISC architecture project
1984: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. co-founded by Dr. John Hennessy, Robert Wall and Dr. John Moussouris
1989: First IPO in November as MIPS Computer Systems
1992: SGI acquires MIPS Computer Systems. Transform it into internal MIPS Group, and then incorporates and renames it to MIPS Technologies, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI)
1998: Re-IPO as MIPS Technologies, Inc
2002: acquires the UK-based GNU tool chain company Algorithmics Ltd.
September 6, 2005: acquired First Silicon Solutions (FS2), a Lake Oswego, Oregon company as a wholly owned subsidiary. FS2 specializes in silicon IP, design services and OCI® (On-Chip Instrumentation) development tools for programming, testing, debug and trace of embedded systems in SoC, SOPC, FPGA, ASSP and ASIC devices.