[2][3] MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications.

The company generated intense interest in the late 1980s, seeing design wins with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Silicon Graphics (SGI), among others.

The company was purchased by SGI in 1992, by that time its only major customer, and won several new designs in the game console space.

After several years operating as an independent design house, in 2013 the company was purchased by Imagination Technologies, best known for their PowerVR graphics processor family.

[10] MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was founded in 1984[11] by a group of researchers from Stanford University including John L. Hennessy and Chris Rowen.

That year, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released a Unix workstation based on the MIPS design.

[19] During this time, two future microprocessors code-named The Beast and Capitan were in development; these were cancelled after SGI decided to migrate to the Itanium architecture[20] in 1998.

[25] SGI spun MIPS out completely on June 20, 2000, by distributing all its interest as stock dividend to the stockholders.

In addition to its main R&D center in Sunnyvale, California,[43] MIPS has engineering facilities in Shanghai, China, Beaverton, Oregon, Bristol and Kings Langley, both in England.

[46] Imagination had outbid Ceva Inc to buy MIPS with an offer of $100 million,[47] and was investing to develop the architecture for the embedded processor market.

In 2017, under financial pressure itself, Imagination Technologies sold the MIPS processor business to a California-based investment company, Tallwood Venture Capital.

[48] Tallwood in turn sold the business to Wave Computing in 2018,[49] both of these companies reportedly having their origins with, or ownership links to, a co-founder of Chips and Technologies and S3 Graphics.

[50] Despite the regulatory obstacles that had forced Imagination to divest itself of the MIPS business prior to its own acquisition by Canyon Bridge, bankruptcy proceedings for Wave Computing indicated that the company had in 2018 and 2019 transferred full licensing rights for the MIPS architecture for China, Hong Kong and Macau to CIP United, a Shanghai-based company.

[10] In September 2023, MIPS named former Texas Instruments (TI) executive Sameer Wasson CEO.

Wasson spent 18 years at TI, most recently as vice president, Business Unit (BU) Manager, Processors.

Both cores provide support for privileged hardware virtualization, user defined custom extensions, multi-threading, hybrid debug, and functional safety.

The OpenWrt Table of Hardware now includes MIPS-based devices from Atheros, Broadcom, Cavium, Lantiq, MediaTek, etc.