Like ARM, MIPS doesn't manufacture chips itself; it licenses its designs to other companies. The completed design for the proAptiv, known as the "production RTL," will be available to licensees this quarter, or by the end of September, Throndson said.

It takes a chip maker about 18 months to turn a CPU design into a finished system-on-chip, so he doesn't expect the first smartphones and tablets with proAptiv inside to go on sale for about two years.

That's a long time to wait, but there are some encouraging early signs. MIPS has published a performance score for proAptiv based on the CoreMark benchmark that Microprocessor Report, an industry publication, said was for licensable CPUs.

"MIPS faces a number of business challenges before it can seize the high ground in mobile markets, but the technical features of its Aptiv product family should make the market for licensable CPU cores much more competitive," wrote Scott Gardner, senior editor for Microprocessor Report.

He also noted that it "remains to be seen if real application performance will match up to the high CoreMark score." Still, since Intel has failed to make a significant dent in ARM's business, it won't hurt consumers to have another competitor to keep ARM on its toes.