Yep. Amazing when you consider that Windows CE ran on MIPS hardware (NEC VR3xxx and VR4xxx chips). Casio's Cassiopeia series for example.
It's not quite a "what could have been" because they were really eclipsed by the StrongARM at that point, as I recall, but it's very notable how quickly people lost interest in MIPS.
It lived on for quite a while with a strong position in the networking market later on.
But then instead of focusing on networking/infrastructure hardware like they could have, they went on a wild goose chase... to try to gain a place in phones.
To be fair, Power PC was also trying an extended post-AIM life in networking. I don't know if the big-endianess of some networking stacks had anything to do with it.
The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard. One could even see it from the Windows Device manager as such :D
I see NXP has largely slowed development of their old Freescale PPC lineup (formerly Motorola's PPC and logic division) in favor of arm chips.
> The earliest Killer networking cards had a PPC chip onboard.
In my collection I have an IBM server that has two Pentium II processors and, IIRC, three PowerPCs handling specialized chores such as the network and disk array.
The Telum processor is only part of the story of their new mainframe too. While it's the Telum that runs the application code, there are many other different processors (and some Telums with different microcode loaded on boot) performing specialized jobs. The machine can have up to 256 Telum cores, but there's a maximum of 200 that can be dedicated to user code. The remaining cores will be working to ensure the user code doesn't need to wait for anything.
The PSP (Playstation Portable) was a MIPS device too.
My last encounter with MIPS was a payment terminal I worked on in 2014, which sadly never made it to market. There was a company making 'secure' variants with a variety of hardware features suited to payment terminals - a hardware TRNG, a couple of pins which transmitted and received a TRNG signal constantly, so that you could attach a tamper-detection wire and brick the device if it broke, key-erasure features etc.
