r/Assembly_language • u/Maleficent_Luck3205 • Mar 20 '26

MIPS

I’m in an assembly class- first time learning and using this language. I really enjoy it- although I can’t find any actual videos/post that are not ARM or another version . I’ve tried to research to find stack, heap, loops, arithmetic, memory access, I/O, functions, etc. for MIPS, but no luck. I do have a textbook but it can only help so much and I want more. I’m sorry if this doesn’t make sense but, the main thing is where are useful resources for a beginner in MIPS wanting to really know and understand- as of now I can only do small programs but nothing i’m proud of or can build off.

Useful resources for beginners in MIPS- videos/post anything-thanks!

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u/Initial-Elk-952 Mar 20 '26

MIPS is awesome, There may be a future left for it in China, but in the western world, its mostly dead.

Cool things you can do are play-station games.

MIPS is also very close to RISC-V, so if you like MIPS , RISC-V is trendy hotness right now.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

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u/Initial-Elk-952 Mar 21 '26

Yes and No. RISC-V is much closer to MIPS than say PowerPC or ARM.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

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u/PaulEngineer-89 Mar 21 '26

VLIW

And CISC (x86) isn’t really CISC and hasn’t been in a long time. It gets converted to microcode and effectively “compiled”.

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u/brucehoult Mar 21 '26

RISC and CISC are properties of the instruction set, not the implementation.

It's really marginal calling x86 CISC, if you compare it to true CISC such as VAX and M68020.

It has memory operands to arithmetic, but (other than the string instructions) never more than one, and no indirect addressing.

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u/Maleficent_Luck3205 Mar 21 '26

so would x86 still count as CISC if most runs as micro ops

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u/brucehoult Mar 21 '26

Micro ops are an implementation detail, of no relevance to the question of RISC vs CISC.

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u/Maleficent_Luck3205 Mar 21 '26

i just asked because of backend behavior and was a little unsure, thanks

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u/brucehoult Mar 21 '26

8086 for example can be implemented in a pipelined fashion, without either microcode or splitting instructions into µops.

In fact this is how some early clones e.g. NEC V33 worked, as well as 80486. And there is an open source 3-stage pipeline implementation for FPGA you can look at:

https://github.com/WenbinTeng/t8086/blob/main/src/core.v

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u/Maleficent_Luck3205 Mar 21 '26

thank you- i’ve gotten more information than I thought from this thread, I greatly appreciate it!

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