MIPS Architecture - MIPS V

MIPS V

MIPS V is the fifth version of the architecture, announced on 21 October 1996 at the Microprocessor Forum 1996. MIPS V was designed to improve the performance of 3D graphics applications. In the mid-1990s, a major use of non-embedded MIPS microprocessors were graphics workstations from SGI. MIPS V was complemented by the integer-only MIPS Digital Media Extensions (MDMX) multimedia extensions, which were announced on the same date as MIPS V.

MIPS V implementations were never introduced. In 1997, SGI announced the "H1" or "Beast" and the "H2" or "Capitan" microprocessors. The former was to have been the first MIPS V implementation, and was due to be introduced in 1999. The "H1" and "H2" projects were later combined and were eventually canceled in 1998.

MIPS V added a new data type, the pair-single (PS), which consisted of two single-precision (32-bit) floating-point numbers stored in the existing 64-bit floating-point registers. Variants of existing floating-point instructions for arithmetic, compare and conditional move were added to operate on this data type in a SIMD fashion. New instructions were added for loading, rearranging and converting PS data. It was the first architecture to exploit floating-point SIMD with existing resources.