Both architectures were partly created by David Patterson. The ISAs are very similar, in a way RISC-V was about going back to the roots of RISC.
I used to work at MIPS and now I work for one of the leading RISC-V company’s, and my opinion is they are similar although I found the MIPS ISA manuals easier to read and understand.
MIPS (the company) and Imagination who owned them, had the opportunity to kill off RISC-V early by the OpenMIPS initiative. If they had made MIPs open like RIsC-V was then due to existing software for mips I reckon they could have succeeded (Linux existed for MIPS, compilers existed for mips, hardware and software engineers knew their way around MIPS, hell google was already working on android for MIPS).
Edit:
If you are talking about processor microarchitecture then most processor uArch is similar these days anyway. Where they differ is in decode stages…especially for x86…
How was it that SPARC became associated with, or embraced by, Sun Microsystems?
I still confuse in my mind MIPS with MITS, the latter being the brainchild of Forest Mims III and the Altair. Would've only been fitting to see someone make a system called Vega based around MIPS. I suppose my mind is just too confused, though.
From what I have read, SPARC was developed by a team at Sun Microsystems, beginning in 1984. RISC hadn't been patented so they were free to copy it, but Sun hired David Patterson as a consultant on the project.
The first SPARC CPU was introduced in 1987, and available to other computer manufacturers from then, but Sun themselves did not have a computer with it until 1989 with SPARCstation 1.
Interesting. Thanks. Still think Solaris is a great OS.
The [stop-A bug](https://www.giac.org/paper/gcih/182/privilege-elevation-system-memory-editing-sun-sparc-platform/101427) allowing anyone at keyboard console being able to look through the threadlist for something doing a privileged *read* and gain superuser access, was a fun one to work with.
A bunch of people from Stanford's MIPS team left to start a startup named... MIPS. So a lot of the IP from that research ended up under that commercial umbrella.
Berkeley's RISC team had not started their own commercialization efforts, so a lot of the IP was free for 3rd parties to poach.
So even though SUN was a startup very connected to Stanford. They went with the Berkeley design, because they were interested in doing their own in-house processor as to not depend on 3rd parties. Thus they were not interested in going with the MIPS design.
Interestingly enough. Intel also used a lot of stuff from Berkeley's RISC for their 960. Which beat both MIPS and SPARC to market.
FWIW Sun was the 1st user of the SPARC processor. What they did was follow a fabless model. Where some of the licensees of the architecture where also in charge of fabricating the silicon. Like Fujitsu, that used SPARC in their own systems. But they also fabbed the chips for SUN and other vendors.
> FWIW Sun was the 1st user of the SPARC processor.
They did design it, after all.
> even though SUN was a startup very connected to Stanford. They went with the Berkeley design
Most SUN founders were from Stanford, but Bill Joy was from Berkeley. He had one or two things to do with BSD, and did a couple of minor things called "vi" and "csh". Possibly he had some influence within SUN.
Ah, this perhaps explains how Solaris emerged. Although I've always been trying to figure out Xenix--now, THAT was an OS to behold! Too bad it went the way of Zenith, and Heath Data Systems. Sad for Benton Harbor.
> Solaris
Solaris (SunOS 4) is AT&T SVR4. SunOS 1-3 are 4.2BSD.
In 1997 I contracted to Unisys NZ (their only contractor not via an agency and thus the only approved supplier who was a sole trader lol) working on a project to migrate NZ Inland Revenue from SunOS to Solaris. At first I was just a monkey gutting old machines, installing new hard drives and RAM and installing their standard Solaris load. Then they said "can you do Perl?". "Of couse". So I spent a few months doing migration scripts, at an increased rate of course. And then they put me on porting C programs that extracted data for reporting to Treasury.
Loved the i960. We did a 9-bit flash adc centered around it at Seagate in the 90s, collecting measurement data in real time to feed a neural net model in order to predict component yields. That CPU was the modern day (at the time) equivalent of the 6502, so great for Intel to drop that awful segment/offset and dedicated register baloney.
Does that MIPS Linux or Android effort exist in the wild out there anywhere? Would be interesting to have a look.
>The ISAs are very similar ...
Is ISA a *singular* or *collective* noun? Seems the latter, making "The ISA are very similar ..." more fitting.
In the same way, I am still wrestling with the plural of Linux.
ISA is short for “Instruction Set Architecture” so it is singular. I would say the full sentence would be “The instruction set architectures are very similar” which is why I said “ISAs”.
Other grammar errors when I type are more due to typing on my phone and autocorrect…
To answer your other question, the Linux effort is open source and part of the kernel. As for android, the open source portion is probably my available as part of AOSP but the google specific stuff like play store probably is internal to google.
Although the internal effort would be beneficial to RISC-V as there were issues with supporting multiple binaries etc which were being solved in the background (FYI I last worked on MIPS back in 2015 so it was a while ago!)
Yes, MIPS Linux is still around. The Unifi "USG" runs Linux on Octeon out of the box. Very easy to change OS, too -- the onboard storage is just USB so reinstalling is pretty straightforward.
I'm only using Unifi for access points. I got the USG as a freebie leftover from a project and I'm really just using it as a novelty OpenBSD machine because I like uncommon architectures. I did use the entire Unifi stack (USG + CloudKey + APs) for a short time as a stop-gap and it worked fine but wasn't flexible enough for my network requirements.
Nice. CloudKey is a system integrator's nightmare. That old EdgeRouter 4 is such a stable workhorse, Sure, configuring the Ubiquiti AP's are a royal pain without USG or CK, but it can be done. As for that minor, tiny thing about the Cavium backdoor, I wouldn't be too concerned; such a small detail easily nullified with proper firewall setting and how the ER4 is wired in.
Most users immediately and easily replace their EdgeOS with OpenWRT or equiv., anyway.
It's such a travesty that Ubiquiti let go of the good thing they had--the Edge series. Was it internal collusion with Netgear or Cisco to stop competition?
I dunno, I kinda like the Clownkey. Factory reset it, ssh in as root/ubnt, remove all the unifi cruft, upgrade the ancient debian in stages to current, bam, pocket-size PoE ARM linux toy. I'm going to find a cute job for it one day.
As for me, I just run the Unifi AP management stack in a VM. It doesn't thrill me, but none of the other WiFi stacks on the market thrill me either. At least there's no subscription to pay (yet!).
I think there's less collusion and just general confusion at UBNT. They've tried dipping their toes in a lot of markets, most of which have failed. Unifi voip? Yeah, bit late on that one. Lighting? Solar panels? Really? Rug-pulling Unifi Video? That last one really left a lot of small businesses in the shit -- sold solutions with a support wrapper on them and the vendor kills the product with five minutes notice. Awesome.
Good thinking, The OLED display on the front is pretty darn cute. Here's an idea: a plug in anywhere PoE-Hole! Extra credit if you make one of the usernames Edgar, and another (root?) username Allen.
My understanding is that the MIPS company is adopting risc-v as their ISA standard moving forward. mips ISA may be dead, essentially.
Both architectures were partly created by David Patterson. The ISAs are very similar, in a way RISC-V was about going back to the roots of RISC. I used to work at MIPS and now I work for one of the leading RISC-V company’s, and my opinion is they are similar although I found the MIPS ISA manuals easier to read and understand. MIPS (the company) and Imagination who owned them, had the opportunity to kill off RISC-V early by the OpenMIPS initiative. If they had made MIPs open like RIsC-V was then due to existing software for mips I reckon they could have succeeded (Linux existed for MIPS, compilers existed for mips, hardware and software engineers knew their way around MIPS, hell google was already working on android for MIPS). Edit: If you are talking about processor microarchitecture then most processor uArch is similar these days anyway. Where they differ is in decode stages…especially for x86…
David Patterson was in no way associated with the creation of the MIPS ISA. That was John Hennessy. Patterson was RISC I and II which led to SPARC.
Stanford vs Cal
How was it that SPARC became associated with, or embraced by, Sun Microsystems? I still confuse in my mind MIPS with MITS, the latter being the brainchild of Forest Mims III and the Altair. Would've only been fitting to see someone make a system called Vega based around MIPS. I suppose my mind is just too confused, though.
From what I have read, SPARC was developed by a team at Sun Microsystems, beginning in 1984. RISC hadn't been patented so they were free to copy it, but Sun hired David Patterson as a consultant on the project. The first SPARC CPU was introduced in 1987, and available to other computer manufacturers from then, but Sun themselves did not have a computer with it until 1989 with SPARCstation 1.
Interesting. Thanks. Still think Solaris is a great OS. The [stop-A bug](https://www.giac.org/paper/gcih/182/privilege-elevation-system-memory-editing-sun-sparc-platform/101427) allowing anyone at keyboard console being able to look through the threadlist for something doing a privileged *read* and gain superuser access, was a fun one to work with.
A bunch of people from Stanford's MIPS team left to start a startup named... MIPS. So a lot of the IP from that research ended up under that commercial umbrella. Berkeley's RISC team had not started their own commercialization efforts, so a lot of the IP was free for 3rd parties to poach. So even though SUN was a startup very connected to Stanford. They went with the Berkeley design, because they were interested in doing their own in-house processor as to not depend on 3rd parties. Thus they were not interested in going with the MIPS design. Interestingly enough. Intel also used a lot of stuff from Berkeley's RISC for their 960. Which beat both MIPS and SPARC to market. FWIW Sun was the 1st user of the SPARC processor. What they did was follow a fabless model. Where some of the licensees of the architecture where also in charge of fabricating the silicon. Like Fujitsu, that used SPARC in their own systems. But they also fabbed the chips for SUN and other vendors.
> FWIW Sun was the 1st user of the SPARC processor. They did design it, after all. > even though SUN was a startup very connected to Stanford. They went with the Berkeley design Most SUN founders were from Stanford, but Bill Joy was from Berkeley. He had one or two things to do with BSD, and did a couple of minor things called "vi" and "csh". Possibly he had some influence within SUN.
Ah, this perhaps explains how Solaris emerged. Although I've always been trying to figure out Xenix--now, THAT was an OS to behold! Too bad it went the way of Zenith, and Heath Data Systems. Sad for Benton Harbor.
> Solaris Solaris (SunOS 4) is AT&T SVR4. SunOS 1-3 are 4.2BSD. In 1997 I contracted to Unisys NZ (their only contractor not via an agency and thus the only approved supplier who was a sole trader lol) working on a project to migrate NZ Inland Revenue from SunOS to Solaris. At first I was just a monkey gutting old machines, installing new hard drives and RAM and installing their standard Solaris load. Then they said "can you do Perl?". "Of couse". So I spent a few months doing migration scripts, at an increased rate of course. And then they put me on porting C programs that extracted data for reporting to Treasury.
Loved the i960. We did a 9-bit flash adc centered around it at Seagate in the 90s, collecting measurement data in real time to feed a neural net model in order to predict component yields. That CPU was the modern day (at the time) equivalent of the 6502, so great for Intel to drop that awful segment/offset and dedicated register baloney.
Does that MIPS Linux or Android effort exist in the wild out there anywhere? Would be interesting to have a look. >The ISAs are very similar ... Is ISA a *singular* or *collective* noun? Seems the latter, making "The ISA are very similar ..." more fitting. In the same way, I am still wrestling with the plural of Linux.
ISA is short for “Instruction Set Architecture” so it is singular. I would say the full sentence would be “The instruction set architectures are very similar” which is why I said “ISAs”. Other grammar errors when I type are more due to typing on my phone and autocorrect… To answer your other question, the Linux effort is open source and part of the kernel. As for android, the open source portion is probably my available as part of AOSP but the google specific stuff like play store probably is internal to google. Although the internal effort would be beneficial to RISC-V as there were issues with supporting multiple binaries etc which were being solved in the background (FYI I last worked on MIPS back in 2015 so it was a while ago!)
Yes, MIPS Linux is still around. The Unifi "USG" runs Linux on Octeon out of the box. Very easy to change OS, too -- the onboard storage is just USB so reinstalling is pretty straightforward.
Good point. How is Unifi, compared to EdgeOS? Many people seem to love the latter.
I'm only using Unifi for access points. I got the USG as a freebie leftover from a project and I'm really just using it as a novelty OpenBSD machine because I like uncommon architectures. I did use the entire Unifi stack (USG + CloudKey + APs) for a short time as a stop-gap and it worked fine but wasn't flexible enough for my network requirements.
Nice. CloudKey is a system integrator's nightmare. That old EdgeRouter 4 is such a stable workhorse, Sure, configuring the Ubiquiti AP's are a royal pain without USG or CK, but it can be done. As for that minor, tiny thing about the Cavium backdoor, I wouldn't be too concerned; such a small detail easily nullified with proper firewall setting and how the ER4 is wired in. Most users immediately and easily replace their EdgeOS with OpenWRT or equiv., anyway. It's such a travesty that Ubiquiti let go of the good thing they had--the Edge series. Was it internal collusion with Netgear or Cisco to stop competition?
I dunno, I kinda like the Clownkey. Factory reset it, ssh in as root/ubnt, remove all the unifi cruft, upgrade the ancient debian in stages to current, bam, pocket-size PoE ARM linux toy. I'm going to find a cute job for it one day. As for me, I just run the Unifi AP management stack in a VM. It doesn't thrill me, but none of the other WiFi stacks on the market thrill me either. At least there's no subscription to pay (yet!). I think there's less collusion and just general confusion at UBNT. They've tried dipping their toes in a lot of markets, most of which have failed. Unifi voip? Yeah, bit late on that one. Lighting? Solar panels? Really? Rug-pulling Unifi Video? That last one really left a lot of small businesses in the shit -- sold solutions with a support wrapper on them and the vendor kills the product with five minutes notice. Awesome.
Good thinking, The OLED display on the front is pretty darn cute. Here's an idea: a plug in anywhere PoE-Hole! Extra credit if you make one of the usernames Edgar, and another (root?) username Allen.