It used to be that we had to work from the bottom up. The CPUs were too slow to afford the luxury of writing OS or hardware driver code in any other way. I'm an old hand at writing ARM assembly, from way back in the day - Acorn Computers development (in the UK) of their original VLSI before the days of ARM Ltd. :D
MIPS looks interesting and quite different to ARM....great stuff.
Nice! Cool I guess :)
I also think of working in the VLSI region of Computer Science when I'm finished with my study.
It's difficult to learn all that stuff and to get really really good at it, but it's so interesting to know how everything is working from bottom up :P
I met a lot of interesting people back in the day, unfortunately the collapse of the Acorn group meant I had to diversify into other platforms. I'd invested years of time up until the StrongARM (Intel) deal. Yes Intel made an Arm CPU....hell froze over.
Shame it took ARM Ltd a little while to take off after the collapse, I'd much rather had kept coding in assembler given the chance. Many of the embedded tech jobs went to the well-connected and it took a long time for Arm to become what it is now.
If you want to try your hand at programming Arm assembler a fun way to do it is to get a hold of a Raspberry PI and RiscOS (which is still under OSS development). You can inline ARM assembly language using the BASIC interpreter. ...just like I used to :D