Re: MIPS vs ARM architectures

Daniel Lenski wrote:

Hi all,
I've been curious about the relative merits of ARM and MIPS and just
stumbled across a thread from March in which this was discussed a bit

(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.embedded/browse_frm/thread/732d062b040a5039/6261b3e0103cb19b?lnk=st&q=arm+processor&rnum=1#6261b3e0103cb19b).

I'm a physics student and have gotten interested in RISC processors, since
taking a course on Verilog/FPGA. I've been playing around with the
open-source MIPS cores uCore and YACC (from opencores.org), and it's
pretty fun to get a 100 MHz MIPS processor running on my Altera
development board.

I was under the impression that ARM's instruction set allows for denser
code (even without Thumb), since it allows barrel shifting in arithmetic
instructions and post-increment of index registers. It seems like a very
clever design to me. On the other hand, MIPS has twice as many registers,
32 vs. 16. And all (I think?) licensed MIPS processors include an MMU,
while many ARM cores do not have an MMU. Then, ARM is more popular it
seems, but has very high licensing costs. And ARM's assembly language
might be easier to work with, but which is better for compilers?

I'm wondering what others think... what are the relative merits of the two
architectures? Am I correct to think that MIPS might allow faster clock
speeds and smaller dies, because of its simpler instruction set? Anyway,
I'd love to know what others think. Myself, I have only coded assembly
language for x86 and AVR (8-bit RISC microcontroller), so I don't have any
low-level experience with 32-bit RISC.

Phil Koopman wrote an interesting book that compared processor architecture
and provided some notions to examine the different styles. The book is now
downloadable from

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.html


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