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MIPS – The hyperactive history and legacy of the pioneering RISC architecture

(thechipletter.substack.com)
75 points rbanffy | 10 comments | 21 Jul 25 18:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.348s | source | bottom
1. frollogaston ◴[21 Jul 25 20:00 UTC] No.44639784[source]▶
UC Berkeley's intro to computer architecture course still uses MIPS for projects and exam questions.
replies(4): >>44639962 #>>44640026 #>>44641176 #>>44642192 #
2. Ar-Curunir ◴[21 Jul 25 20:18 UTC] No.44639962[source]▶
CS61C uses RISC-V now.
replies(2): >>44640184 #>>44640313 #
3. marnett ◴[21 Jul 25 20:26 UTC] No.44640026[source]▶
This was true of University of Maryland back in 2015 when I was there…
4. frollogaston ◴[21 Jul 25 20:43 UTC] No.44640184[source]▶
Oh, cool! I remember hearing a lot about RISC-V back then, and it's also from Berkeley, so makes sense.
5. bitwize ◴[21 Jul 25 20:55 UTC] No.44640313[source]▶
Makes sense. Isn't MIPS like a commercial variant of RISC-I?
replies(1): >>44640353 #
6. chasil ◴[21 Jul 25 20:59 UTC] No.44640353{3}[source]▶
IIRC, Berkeley RISC was mainly SPARC, although it was also the AMD 29k.

Stanford was MIPS.

7. VoidWhisperer ◴[21 Jul 25 22:36 UTC] No.44641176[source]▶
Rochester Institute of Technology had MIPS in their CSCI-250 Concepts of Computer Systems class. I remember debugging my final project for the semester being a bit of a nightmare because it was a much larger MIPS assembly project, and debugging it used gdb if I remember correctly..

Not sure if they still use it as I graduated from there back in 2020

8. shagie ◴[22 Jul 25 00:59 UTC] No.44642192[source]▶
Who else used (uses?) SPIM for this?

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.html ... and apparently its being kept up to date https://spimsimulator.sourceforge.net with new builds about every other year.

(I took the class from Professor Miller in... '92... Operating systems in... '94? 95? was from Professor Larus)

replies(2): >>44644009 #>>44644965 #
9. infinitifall ◴[22 Jul 25 07:05 UTC] No.44644009[source]▶
A first year course at UNSW, COMP1521[1] teaches MIPS and uses QtSPIM. Far from dead, a package is maintained on the AUR[2].

[1] https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs1521

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qtspim

10. pjmlp ◴[22 Jul 25 09:48 UTC] No.44644965[source]▶
My university in Portugal did (UNL/FCT), similar timeframe.