I mostly agree with your argument except one thing - even though geode 
and alike can shrink their die size, mips will do so as well with moving 
to a new technology. It is all about the costs in embedded market. So if 
say mips will be 2mm on die and geode 4mm, mips still wins.
As far as holding on to low end I think you are not absolutely correct 
here. I can give many examples - PIC being on extremely low end, 8051, 
Z80, etc. These processors were expensive and large at some point but 
now they are tiny and very wide spread. ARM is a low end solution and 
has been expanding its presence for a very long time. I am not sure why 
set tops not using ARM but somehow they are not at least not in big numbers.

MIPS64 is not very useful on low end, there is not much memory and you 
don't need much horse power there. It just takes extra die space without 
any measurable benefits. That is why you don't see it much. As far as 
multi core goes Broadcom has multi core chips that are in the routers 
and some other networking products.

At the end it is all decided by price/performance ratio or !/$.

Regards,
Alex



Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Alex Pelts wrote:
>> Why do you think mips is dying architecture? It holds probably 50% of
>> embedded market. I think most of the set top box market is mips, and
>> probably 50% of home router/gateway.
> 
> ARM/Xscale and now low power Geode/x86ish solutions seem to be
> encroaching very heavily into this place.  I would be surprised if 50%
> of _new_ designs were still MIPS.  Certainly there is still a lot of
> movement of MIPS product, but I think it is almost exclusively at the
> low-end, typically systems that are < 500MHz single core MIPS32.  I've
> not seen any real movement in the MIPS64 space.
> 
> This new product is a higher-end product, and shows some promise.
> 
> (MIPS -- or any architecture -- can't hold onto just the low-end --
> because eventually process improvements and cost-reductions push
> formerly high-end products into the low-end.  So there has to be
> innovation and getting into higher-end products is a good way to ensure
> that innovation eventually trickles down into the lower end market
> segments.)
> 
>     -- Garrett
>> Regards,
>> Alex
>>
>>
>> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>>> Timo Schoeler wrote:
>>>> http://www.movidis.com/products/rev.asp
>>>>
>>>> 16 core MIPS CPU, ECC RAM, very low power design.
>>>>
>>>> or wait for PA Semi and their PowerPC-based PWFficient? :)
>>>>
>>>> cheers,
>>>>
>>> I want one. :-)
>>>
>>> Just when you think MIPS is a dying architecture, news like this comes
>>> out...
>>>
> 
>