MIPS-Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages

MIPS designs are used in a lot of embedded systems such as the Series2 TiVo, Windows CE devices, Cisco routers, and video game consoles similar to the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable handheld system. Until late 2006 they were also used in a lot of SGI's computer products.

Near the beginning MIPS architectures were 32-bit implementations, while later versions were 64-bit implementations. Multiple revisions of the MIPS instruction set exist, including MIPS I, MIPS II, MIPS III, MIPS IV, MIPS V, MIPS32, and MIPS64. The current revisions are MIPS32 (for 32-bit implementations) and MIPS64 for (64-bit implementations). MIPS32 and MIPS64 define a control register set as well as the instruction set. Several "add-on" extensions are also available, including MIPS-3D which is a simple set of floating-point SIMD orders dedicated to common 3D tasks, MDMX which is a more extensive integer SIMD instruction set using the 64-bit floating-point registers, MIPS16e which adds density to the instruction stream to make programs take up less room, and the recent addition of MIPS MT, new multithreading additions to the system similar to Hyper Threading in the Intel's Pentium 4 processors.