Software investment is the biggest ticket item in any project. Hence it is important to choose an instruction set architecture (ISA) that offers a truly scalable solution for future development. To address various embedded market segments, MIPS Technologies offers distinct, binary-compatible families of processor cores that span applications from 32-bit microcontrollers all the way to 64-bit multi-threaded, superscalar many-core processors for networking infrastructure, and numerous digital consumer markets in between. Since one can seamlessly scale the performance range between a wide array of processors, the MIPS® architecture offers an ideal path for protecting software investment on a new design or a follow-on/upgrade to an existing project. This paper illustrates the ease of migration from the Power to MIPS architecture, and highlights the areas that users need to focus on during this process.