Interesting, I'll admit that I haven't worked on a MIPS-based platform in a while. I suppose that with ARM becoming the de-facto standard for powerful embedded chips MIPS can only stay relevant in specific niches.

It is more widespread than you may assume. A lot of Ubiquity gear uses MIPS. Chips on hardware which are not the processor might be ARM or MIPS.

I think the only reason that MIPS is still found in WiFi gear is because 802.11ac was a 5GHz-only standard. Current WiFi routers and APs can get by with an old MIPS-based SoC with 802.11n 2.4GHz, plus a separate 802.11ac 5GHz NIC connected by PCIe. With 802.11ax, the MIPS-based WiFi SoCs will finally be obsolete, and all the newer WiFi SoCs are ARM-based.

Ubiquiti and a few others are still using older Cavium Octeon network processors that are MIPS-based and don't have built-in WiFi driving their obsolescence. However, I think 2.5Gb/5Gb Ethernet will eventually push those products to adopt the newer ARM-based Octeon processors, leaving MIPS very dead in the networking world.

Thanks for the detailed, informative post. I'll be selling my Ubiquiti networking gear ASAP to upgrade to ARM-based and x86-64-based networking gear.