The chip has 250K transistors. In liquid nitrogen, the filter executes 1 billion operations per seconds. The Caltech MiniMIPS is an asynchronous MIPS R3000 designed betweeen 1995 and 1998. It consists of a full 32-bit RISC CPU, and a memory management unit. It has two operating modes, user and kernel.
Branches have a single delay-slot.
The first prototype is not the complete MIPS but a slighty reduced version. This first prototype is a full-custom hand layout. But this first prototype didn't achieve these performances. All chips were found functional except one whose package was defective. The test performance on small programs are as follows.