Introducing the FR500 Embedded Microprocessor

0272-1732/00/$10.00  2000 IEEE Because conventional RISC processors have insufficient processing power to support the continuing development of digital consumer products, we need a new highperformance processor for multimedia applications. Processing multimedia video images requires more than 10 times the currently available performance. At Fujitsu, we provide this higher performance in software to attain a high degree of flexibility. We developed the FR500 microprocessor with a novel embedded VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture for use in such digital consumer products. The FR500 is the first product in the FR-V line, Fujitsu’s generic name for VLIW architecture microprocessors. The FR-V line offers the flexibility to develop new products optimized for a wide variety of digital consumer products. Here, we describe the FR-V architecture, which includes our variable-length VLIW and instruction set architectures, speculative execution control, and conditional execution control. We also evaluate its performance.