MIPS preens after shipping 100 millionth CPU

Eat your heart out, Intel. MIPS says it has now shipped more than 100 million processors, and while that might not match Intel's total, MIPS' 48 million in 1997, capturing a claimed 49 per cent of the embedded Risc processor market, isn't half bad. Kind of spoiling the arithmetic, MIPS boasts that the real significance of the milestone is that more than half of the 100 million units have shipped in the last three years, which means either somebody at MIPS can't count, some of the licensees are pretending hard they can't count, or the company shifted dismal numbers in 1996 and 1998 so far. MIPS' big volume customer is the games console outfit Nintendo, but it's starting to diversify. Tektronix, NCD, various CE machines and PalmPC, and set-top boxes from General Instruments, EchoStar and webTV are customers. The company has been frequently sneered at, its low-cost business categorised by rivals as dead meat if Nintendo goes away, but it argues that it's in a growing segment, and that as appliances and devices take off, it will be sitting pretty. Which is as good a pitch as the ones from the rival embedded companies who were doing the sneering. ® Click for more stories