Pros
Employees have solid reasons to feel proud that they are working at MIPS. The company is a leader in licensable embedded CPUs that enjoys market share success in many vertical segments. It delivers a very high quality IP product for its hundreds of announced customers. Its engineering team is exceptionally knowledgeable in their specialties. The newer embedded CPU architectures push the envelope of multithreading, high performance, low power consumption and price. The engineering deliverables system is efficient and the licensing sales/marketing team exhibits good teamwork and high productivity.
Cons
MIPS culture values individual knowledge and information above other values that are perhaps even more important to group success, so from time to time, there seems to be the tendency to take too long to gather everything, "know everything" before going ahead on a promising opportunity. There is little tolerance for not knowing the answer to perhaps minor points. When knowledge is valued so highly, the behavior exhibited is just to avoid the perceived organizational/career risk. It needs to be relentless in overcoming the common false perception that its major competitor's embedded CPU offerings have lower power consumption per area of silicon compared to MIPS offerings. This is not supported in fact.