MIPS Basics

Architecture

MIPS is a well-known and simple architecture

• historically used everywhere from supercomputers to game consoles
• still popular in some embedded fields e.g. modems/routers, TVs
• but being out-competed by ARM and more recently, RISC-V

Emulators

• mipsy - command-line based emulator written by Zac
• mipsy-web - web (WASM) GUI-based version of mipsy written by Shrey

MIPS

• load and store - transfer data between registers and memory
• computational - perform arithmetic/logical operations
• jump and branch - transfer control of program execution
• coprocessor - standard interface to various co-processors
  • coprocessors implement floating-point operations
• special - miscellaneous tasks (e.g. syscall)