While Uni of California worked on
RISC the original MIPS project was developed at Stanford. MIPS stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages.
RISC and MIPS are both based on the principle software and hardware design must be done together to achieve best performance. They have proved very popular (
SPARC,
PowerPC,
LSI), however
Intel are a good example of the opposite of MIPS and have increased instruction set complexity with each revision of processors.
Back to the principle. A smaller amount of simple instructions which can be implemented with a degree of parallelism is more efficient than providing large and complex hardware instructions which are rarely (if ever) used by compilers.
More instructions are required in software so code density is sacrificed for simplicity (& hence ability to parallelise and increase speed).
Some MIPS standards: MIPS-I is the original instruction set architecture (ISA). Other standards e.g. MIPS-II adds multiprocessor sync, MIPS-III adds 64-bit addressing & data & more floating point instructions, MIPS-IV prefetch & high perf floating point, MIPS-V SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) floating point (for supercomputing/gfx).
The MIPS-16 extension provides a compressed instruction set (reduces memory requirements).
rs = source register, rt = target register
MIPS-16 Instruction |opcode 5|rs 3|rt 3|value 5| 5+3+3+5 = 16 bits, 8 registers
MIPS-I Instruction |opcode 6|rs 5|rt 5|value 16| 6+5+5+16 = 32 bits, 32 registers
RISC/MIPS cache memory to allow for instructions to minimise slower external memory access. This allows each stage of pipeline instructions to execute each step (including cache memory/read or write) in one clock cycle.
MIPS 5 stage pipeline is as follows:
IF Fetch instruction from cache, RD Read registers, ALU Arithmathic/Logic Unit operation, MEM read/write memory (to cache), WB Write registers.
o----------------------------------------------------->time
Pipe1 Instr1 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe2 Instr2 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe3 Instr3 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe4 Instr4 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe5 Instr5 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe1 Instr6 IF RD ALU MEM WB
Pipe2 Instr7 IF RD ALU MEM WB
.. .. . .
.. .. . .
Some MIPS-I/II registers.
Registers are used and named according to conventions.
zero $0
at $1 assembler temporary
v0-v1 $2-$3 values returned by subroutine
a0-a3 $4-$7 values passed to subroutine (arguments)
s0-s7 $16-$23 subroutine variables
sp $29 stack pointer
ra $31 return address
Some instruction examples, a flavour of MIPS assembly
8FA30024, LW $v0,144($sp) # v0 = *(sp+144), Read from address (sp + 144)
AC430000, SW $v1,0($v0) # *(v0+0) = v1, Write to address (v0 + 0)
# Masking example
40036800, MFC0 $v1,$13(0) # Read from CP0 register 13
2402047C, ADDIU $v0,$zero,0x47C # v0 = 47c
00621824, AND $v1,$v1,$v0 # v1 = v1 & v0
24020400, ADDIU $v0,$zero,0x400 # v0 = 400 (ADD Immediate (U = no exception)
# Note the use of NOPs or of useful instructions.
# They used after branch/jump instructions.
# Due to pipelining a branch takes 2 stages
# Conditional branch
1443001C, BNE $v0,$v1,112 # Branch to pc + 112 if (v0 NE v1)
00000000, NOP
# Subroutine return
03400008, JR $ra
3442000A, ORI $v0,$v0,0xA # Store subroutine return value $v0 = 000a
# Load two addresses, copy 32-bit word from one to other
# Note it takes 2 instructions to load 32 bit address
# Note it takes 5 instructions to read & write memory
3C0219FF, LUI $v0,0x19FF # $v0 = 19ff0000
3442FF00, ORI $v0,$v0,0xFF00 # $v0 = 19ffff00
3C035049, LUI $v1,0x5049 # $v1 = 50490000
3463430A, ORI $v1,$v1,0x430A # $v1 = 5049430a
AC430000, SW $v1,0($v0) # *(19ffff00+0) = *(5049430a)