MIPS today isn't what it used to be. It mostly occupies the "we're too cheap to use ARM" segment of the market these days, which is an ignominious fate for what used to be a great architecture. But it's well known and it still has its wonderful instruction set, so maybe someone can make it shine again once it goes fully open.
It also seems to be popular for countries playing catch-up on that whole "we can make our own computers from grounds up" metric - both China and Russia make their own MIPS CPUs, mostly for military use at the moment.
> It also seems to be popular for countries playing catch-up on that whole "we can make our own computers from grounds up" metric - both China and Russia make their own MIPS CPUs, mostly for military use at the moment.
I am no expert on this, but my personal impression is that projects of this kind slowly try to migrate towards RISC-V.
The few times I've dealt with MIPS architecture, it has seemed like software isn't really that well optimised for it. It works. Just... not as fast as it can do, e.g. zlib.
There are some forked versions of the main zlib library with MIPS optimisations in them that really fly, but nothing that has ever hit upstream, and I'm not crazy enough to want to rely on unpatched/unsupported code like that.
