Microprocessor Flexes Core Muscle

Incorporating a high-end SuperH SH-4A CPU core and a PCI bus controller, the SH7780 microprocessor features a dedicated three-bus architecture and delivers up to 720 MIPS and 2.8 GFLOPS at 400 MHz. The three dedicated external busses include a 32-bit DDR SDRAM bus operating at 160 MHz, 32-bit bus for PCI connections, and a 32-bit local bus operating at 100 MHz for connecting to flash memory, SRAM, ATAPI, and PCMCIA. They connect via an internal SuperHyway 64-bit router bus and can operate simultaneously. Other processor features include a floating-point unit with a maximum operating speed of 400 MHz, support for single- and double-precision arithmetic operations, and a four-way, set-associative cache memory that is divided into two 32 KB areas. RENESAS TECHNOLOGY AMERICA INC., San Jose, CA. (408) 382-7407.