The MIPS architecture is an instruction set for computers that was developed at Stanford University in 1981. At the start, MIPS was an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages. Most of it is done in RISC. In a full RISC architecture, all commands have the same length. This simplifies the design of the microchip and allows to use fast clock cycles. At the start, the architecture used a 32 bit bus, but from 1991, a 64 bit architecture was used.