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Comment by salient | Hacker News Reader

ARM has the momentum, compared to MIPS.

While ARM has a lot more momentum I wouldn't completely discount MIPS. They are still out there and churning away in places you wouldn't expect. If I remember correctly the PIC32 is nothing but a modified MIPS core.

In addition, China has staked its domestic chip design efforts on MIPS64:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

Incidentally, I think the following sentence from the Wikipedia introduction is misleading / untrue.

  China uses GNU/Linux with its Loongson processor family
  to achieve technology independence.

It reads to me like a statement that Linux is widely used throughout China, whereas my understanding is that use of non-Microsoft OSs is basically negligible in China[1]. Perhaps someone who knows more than me about this area would like to remove it.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-CN-monthly-201211-201311

Sure, but there was a time that MIPS was in some of the most powerful machines in the world, from workstations to supercomputers. Things can change pretty fast in this industry.

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