Chip company MIPS has unveiled its future roadmap with three families codenamed Jade, Opal and Ruby. Jade is a 32-bit chip family that is based on MIPS 3000 family, and wil be available in both optimised and synthesisable cores in the second half of next year. The Opal family will consist of 64-bit RISC chips, equivalent to the R5000 famly and available as embedded CPUs and also as a custom processor core. The Ruby family is also based on 64-bit technology and will be aimed at high end embedded RISC applications. These chips will come with high performance integer and floating point execution units, MMU and optimised data and instruction caches. MIPS has obviously not given up the ghost on its chip technology, despite the fact that Compaq-Digital has publicly stated it will dump its processors in favour of its own Alpha products. ® Click here for more chip stories