The early MIPS IV architectures were 32-bit; 64-bit versions were developed later.
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28 Facts About MIPS IV
1.
2.
In March 2021, MIPS IV announced that the development of the MIPS IV architecture had ended as the company is making the transition to RISC-V.
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3.
MIPS IV III was eventually implemented by a number of embedded microprocessors.
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4.
MIPS IV V was completed by the integer-only MDMX extension to provide a complete system for improving the performance of 3D graphics applications.
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5.
When MIPS IV Technologies was spun-out of Silicon Graphics in 1998, it refocused on the embedded market.
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7.
MIPS IV is a modular architecture supporting up to four coprocessors.
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8.
MIPS IV I has instructions that load and store 8-bit bytes, 16-bit halfwords, and 32-bit words.
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9.
Since MIPS IV I is a 32-bit architecture, loading quantities fewer than 32 bits requires the datum to be either sign-extended or zero-extended to 32 bits.
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10.
MIPS IV I requires all memory accesses to be aligned to their natural word boundaries, otherwise an exception is signaled.
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11.
MIPS IV I has instructions to perform bitwise logical AND, OR, XOR, and NOR.
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12.
MIPS IV I has instructions to perform left and right logical shifts and right arithmetic shifts.
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13.
MIPS IV I has instructions for signed and unsigned integer multiplication and division.
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14.
MIPS IV I has two instructions for software to signal an exception: System Call and Breakpoint.
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15.
MIPS IV II removed the load delay slot and added several sets of instructions.
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16.
MIPS IV III is a backwards-compatible extension of MIPS IV II that added support for 64-bit memory addressing and integer operations.
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17.
MIPS IV III added a supervisor privilege level in between the existing kernel and user privilege levels.
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18.
MIPS IV III removed the Coprocessor 3 support instructions, and reused its opcodes for the new doubleword instructions.
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19.
MIPS IV was designed to mainly improve floating-point performance.
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20.
MIPS IV added several new FP arithmetic instructions for both single- and double-precision FPNs: fused-multiply add or subtract, reciprocal, and reciprocal square-root.
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21.
MIPS IV V added a new data type, the Paired Single, which consisted of two single-precision floating-point numbers stored in the existing 64-bit floating-point registers.
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22.
MIPS IV has had several calling conventions, especially on the 32-bit platform.
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23.
MIPS IV EABI is supported by GCC but not LLVM, and neither supports NUBI.
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24.
MIPS IV processors are used in embedded systems such as residential gateways and routers.
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25.
MIPS IV processors used to be popular in supercomputers during the 1990s, but all such systems have dropped off the TOP500 list.
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26.
Sample MIPS IV-based platforms include both bare metal environments and platforms for booting unmodified Linux binary images.
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27.
MARS is another GUI-based MIPS IV emulator designed for use in education, specifically for use with Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design.
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28.
WebMIPS IV is a browser-based MIPS IV simulator with visual representation of a generic, pipelined processor.
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