In 1981, John L. Hennessy began the Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (MIPS) project at Stanford University to investigate reduced instruction set computer (RISC) technology. The results of his research convinced him of the future commercial potential of the technology, and in 1984, he took a sabbatical to found MIPS Computer Systems. The company designe…

The R3000 is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in June 1988, it was the second MIPS implementation, succeeding the R2000 as the flagship MIPS microprocessor. It operated at 20, 25 and 33.33 MHz.
The MIPS 1 instruction set is small compared to those of the contemporary 80x…