It turns out that MIPS Technologies Inc’s next generation T5 iteration of the R series RISC is the device that will be released next year as the R5000 and not as the R10000, the designation the company had previously indicated. MIPS has rallied all of its fabrication licensees to help with development of the T5, which, at least in its initial guise, is touted as a general-purpose CPU for workstations and servers that will be out next year. In addition to the low-power VR4200, which from NEC Corp costs an astonishingly low $72 – MIPS and its Silicon Graphics Inc parent have already released machines based on on a high-end TFP variant of the R4000 optimised for floating point performance. Indeed, Silicon Graphics is understood to have added an instruction to the MIPS architecture for the TFP, enabling multiplication and addition functions to be performed in a single batch rather than as separate operations, thereby speeding floating point throughput.
