MIPS, GlobalFoundries Bet on Physical AI

By Aalyia Shaukat , EE Times | March 3, 2026

MIPS has made some waves in the embedded processor IP community, especially with its recent acquisition of Synopsys’s ARC processor IP business. The company has made a major comeback since filing for bankruptcy in 2020 and emerging from the downturn, shifting its focus from Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages (MIPS) to RISC-V architecture. The company heralded the MIPS instruction set with massive success, helping accelerate it’s physical AI roadmap. “We’ve got 200 million SoCs today in autonomous vehicles with long-standing customers,” James Prior, head of marketing at MIPS, told EE Times at CES 2026.

The move to RISC-V

Since its foundational MIPS architecture was introduced in 1985 via the R2000/R3000, MIPS has introduced seven versions of MIPS cores, and since 2022, the eighth generation has been RISC-V. “Our eighth generation of products is our first generation of RISC-V,” Prior said. He referenced the company’s long-standing customer Mobileye, which has already released six generations of its EyeQ product line and recently announced EyeQ7 using the new MIPS RISC-V technology. “EyeQ6 is used in 1,200 different car models across 50 different global OEMs. That’s 75% of ADAS in the actual market.”

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