AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS
I&#x27;m cautiously optimistic about this as a counter to specialized and proprietary hardware.  While other industries are moving towards domain-specific hardware for 3D rendering, AI and physics, I&#x27;m hopeful that the people at MIPS have the insight to know that these are all evolutionary dead ends.<p>The real future is going to be in reprogrammable hardware, something akin to FPGAs but with cores as building block instead of gates.  We need massively parallel chips with an order of magnitude more cores than we have today (at least 256 as a baseline), with better interconnect and smarter routing that can do something like content-addressable memory.<p>MIPS is an ideal candidate for this, as it&#x27;s a textbook example of the minimum number of transistors needed to implement a pipelined CPU.  They should be able to fit hundreds or even thousands of cores in the number of transistors wasted on cache today in mainstream processors from Intel and AMD.  Assuming they don&#x27;t just kill MIPS to do their own proprietary AI DSP..