Introducing the FR500 embedded microprocessor

Because conventional RISC processors have insufficient processing power to support the continuing development of digital consumer products, we need a new high performance 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. In this paper, 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.