MIPS Technologies, the coulda-been-great processor house that's down-on-the-heels for the umpteenth time, has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer. Bloomberg say it got it from "people with knowledge of the decision" and apparently the search is already weeks-old.

MIPS' largest customer is Broadcom, whose name is being bandied about with Qualcomm's, Google's, Nvidia's, AMD's and even ARM's as possible suitors.

Forbes, for one, its ears to the ground, is betting on the AMD rumor, pointing out that "MIPS has a chip that runs Android 4.0 ICS and consumes LESS power than competing ARM parts. Furthermore, that chip is built in old 65nm process versus power-saving 40nm and 28nm competitors."

Forbes thinks it would be a lot smarter for AMD to buy its own chipmaker for its new microserver acquisition than to license ARM as widely expected.

It might also replace some of the engineering talent AMD has lost.

MIPS is supposed to sample a two-core dingus that targets the ARM A9 later this year but again consumes less power and it's got 64-bit chip targeting the A15 in design. ARM is supposedly having trouble with 64-bits.

It's also got 580 patents, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Google is supposed to give MIPS' widgets native support in Android by bundling a MIPS GNU compiler in its SDK and putting all the necessary support for MIPS' ABI in Android code and libraries in a future Android release.

Seems MIPS chips are already in an estimated 1.8 million Android tablets, mostly in China. So Google is mercifully going to make integration a bit easier for the ARM competitor.

Electronic Design reckons MIPS license are way cheaper than the reported $5 million it costs to license an ARM Cortex A9.

MIPS boxes can run Android apps written for ARM through an emulator.

Cisco, Sony and TI are also MIPS licensees.

Its widgets go into TVs, set-top boxes, 3G/4G networks, phones and of course tablets.