Not business model per-se, but not being crippled by pointy hair boss types from C-levels to lowest level managers.
Second to that what got them ahead was their lack of greed and ambition.
Few people who had firsthand experience with buying IC IP licenses I know tell of MIPS 10 years ago as "we will not simply sell you a core, but force feed you all peripherals, and make you pay for 20 more licenses for god know what along the way." Compare it to ARM where you wire money today and get a guy coming to your office to drop off harddrives with netlists a week after.
For support, documentation, software, and everything else ARM was light years ahead.
What made them special is how they combined their hardware with their own version version of UNIX.
Hence why even trying to write portable code across UNIXEs wasn't as easy as many believe.
Irix had IrisGL, Iris Inventor, XFS and a few other goodies, before they became the Open variants.
SGI was also a big sponsor of the C++ STL work.
Domain Specific Architecture talk by Hennessy & Patterson, 2018 talk for 2017 Turing Award: http://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLec...
However I can say yes, we are returning to those days.
Thanks to the thin razor margins you see OEMs now selling un-upgradable phones, laptops, tablets, 2-1, leaving the old desktop PC for a niche market that gets smaller every year, mostly targeted at gamers.
Also OEMs got envious of Apple as the surviving icon of those days, all of them want to be Apple of their market and sell experiences.
The no. 1 reason ARM went ahead
I'm still impressed with my dual-R12000 Octane today.
Is this a specific reference? What device would that be?
https://www.cavium.com/octeon-III-CN7XXX.html
Their stuff turns up on eBay sometimes. Last one I saw was an Octeon II PCI card for just over $200. I was going to use it for network/firewall offloading. Blocking things like Intel ME, too.
Can you elaborate on this? How were you using these to block Intel ME?
I was thinking last year about building one with new hardware given all the hardware/firmware vulnerabilities showing up. I have it on back burner fof now.
1. It needs a communication channel. My guard denies it that.
2. It will create or receive packets using standard format that existing channels support. Using obfuscated formats before traffic hits the guard means its packets will just be dropped.
3. It can still be programmed to just attack the system somehow. Now, we're in realm of targeted, sophisticated attacks more likely to be noticed. That's already an improvement to status quo.
I still think someone should try paying either company's semi-custom division to make one without a ME. Add an extra must-have feature that accelerates common workloads, esp web cache or database, to generate further sales. If they refuse to remove it, then that would be really admitying something if they accepted other modifications for money.
From https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1332...
"... if a company seeks to manage MIPS correctly, what’s the strategy? “The value is in restoring the IP roadmap, the MIPS brand, and coming at the market in a way that doesn’t put MIPS head-to-head with ARM, but concentrates on the parts of the market where ARM is weak and there is good opportunity to license,” one executive said. Citing Mediatek’s recent decision to use MIPS instead of ARM in its modem, he stressed, “ARM is in the modem by default, not for any particular suitability or technological advantage. The apps processor is where ARM has the real advantage, as all of Google Android is built on it, so you avoid this area completely.”
From https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1373/wave-to-acquire-mips/
"[Wave] ... raised $56.7M in funding led by Tallwood Venture Capital – the current owners of MIPS ... While Wave Computing holds over 60 patents, MIPS holds 100s ... in March, Wave announced that they will be integrating the 64-bit MIPS IP cores into their future DPUs. The integration is done in order to allow existing MIPS-based RTOS to handle the control and management functionalities of the chip. Conversely, Wave might be seeing an opportunity by injecting their IPs into the MIPS existing ecosystem. MIPS software and tools are quite mature and can certainly accelerate Wave’s development."