See MIPS Run, 2nd Edition

Foreword

The MIPS architecture was born in the early 1980s from the work done by John Hennessy and his students at Stanford University. They were exploring the architectural concept of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), which theorized that relatively simple instructions, combined with excellent compilers and hardware that used pipelining to execute the instructions, could produce a faster processor with less die area. The concept was so successful that MIPS Computer Systems was formed in 1984 to commercialize the MIPS architecture.

Over the course of the next 14 years, the MIPS architecture evolved in a number of ways and its implementations were used very successfully in workstation and server systems. Over that time, the architecture ...