News - UK Imagination Tech. buys US MIPS Tech. for £38 million

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Meanwhile ARM and others take the vast majority of the firm's patent portfolio.

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Read more.

Be interesting to see if Imagination continue to license and develop MIPS CPU designs, whether they just use the talent internally to make their own SOC or just hoover the patents and let the rest whither away.

The biggest MIPS role in my house is my little Mikrotik router and I bet a lot of us have more MIPS cores around than we realise. I'd have thought ARM would have an interest in squashing MIPS and forcing companies to look for another low-power architecture...

Hmm, can't say I saw that one coming; it wasn't too long ago I heard about something akin to a Cortex competitor, and I haven't been keeping up to date with them much lately, but I didn't realise they were running at a loss. I imagine they will continue to support existing MIPS cores, but I wonder what will happen to newer/high end IP? It could be good if they carried on developing, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to develop two competing cores in parallel. I suppose it depends on how Imagination/ARM plan to work together.

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Originally Posted by watercooled

I suppose it depends on how Imagination/ARM plan to work together.

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They don't really do they? It's the licensees (TI/Apple) who integrate the IP to form SOCs, ARM have their own GPU designs competing with Imagination's.

Looks like ARM just helped lubricate the deal by buying up MIPS patents with their consortium to reduce the value of MIPS itself and separately Imagination bought up the leftovers. I'm confused as to why ARM would seemingly pass up the chance to grab a serious competitors business and eliminate them from the game.

No, and that's not exactly what I meant. I just meant, depending on the circumstances of the sale/patent licenses between the two/etc, MIPS cores may or may not be developed further. After some brief searching (bit preoccupied to read about it properly ATM) it seems like Imagination essentially bought the company, and ARM bought a load of patents.