I've been trying to find one on and off for a year. I wonder if they ever made more than a production sample.

It looks more like some kind of threat / showing off than a product that you can buy. Email and phone calls go unanswered regarding buying one of these.

Yes, MIPS is everywhere in all sorts of consumer devices like routers and cheap Android phones/tablets, but it lacks performance, and also compatibility with existing software.

See the second link - they are using MIPS for HPC so it’s performance must be adequate

MIPS had been used in HPC applications in the past. It’s just an ISA, like x86 or ARM, and (these days) has less to do with performance than the CPU architecture and process user to FAB it. Heck, they could even bring back 68k’s and make them work well enough.

Yep, all you need to do is build a massive out-of-order superscalar pipeline with 8 to 10 execution ports and a very large reorder buffer (150 to 200 uops). And idealy toss in hypertreadding.

Intel has done it with x86, IBM have done it with POWER, AMD have done it with x86 (more or less independently to Intel), Sun/Oracle have done it with SPARC, Apple have done it with ARM and most recently it looks like ARM's Cortex A76 is joining the league.

All these designs look very similar, they are basically variatins on the same archtechure with different front ends.