SuperH Announces Record-Breaking Scores for 64-bit SH-5 RISC CPU Core

SH-5‘out-of-box’ and ‘consumer optimized’ benchmark results

San Jose, USA; Bristol, UK and Tokyo, Japan – 17 February, 2004 SuperH, Inc., the leading supplier of multimedia RISC CPU cores, today announced that it has received outstanding certified scores from the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) for its SH-5 64-bit RISC CPU core family, delivering the highest-ever optimized ConsumerMark TM score for a 64-bit CPU core.

The SH-5 was benchmarked across the complete range of EEMBC’s application benchmark suites and optimized for the Consumer benchmark suite, clearly demonstrating the benefits of using a 64-bit CPU for multimedia applications.

Compared with out-of-the-box results, benchmark tests performed under optimized conditions show an up to five times speed-up of applications such as JPEG codecs. Optimizations were achieved using the SH-5’s 8-way SIMD instruction set.

The SH-5 results were generated using the SuperH GNU C toolchain and cycle accurate simulator. The CPU core used in these benchmarks includes a 64-bit CPU with 2, 4 and 8-way SIMD instruction set, vector floating point unit and MMU. The CPU core is a tiny 2.9mm2 in a generic 0.13um CMOS process. With the memory configuration used in these benchmarks of 32K instruction and 32K data caches, the complete core measures only 9.8mm2.

"The SH-5 has been designed for programmable multimedia applications and the optimized EEMBC benchmark results clearly demonstrate the benefits of our rich SIMD instruction set," said Atsushi Hasegawa, VP of Worldwide Engineering at SuperH, Inc. “We exploit the 64-bit architecture to deliver 8-way SIMD, and at less than 3mm2 the SH-5 CPU core is competitive with 32-bit offerings from other companies.”

Markus Levy, EEMBC president, commented "With these scores SuperH maintains its position as one of the leading CPU companies benefiting from the complete range of EEMBC benchmarks that independently validate the true application performance of its architecture." The SH-5 RISC CPU core is available now as a synthesizable or hard macro for a range of silicon processes and can be implemented at speeds up to 600MHz in a 0.13um process. The SH-5 core includes a full memory management unit and can run a range of operating systems including Linux and Windows CE.NET.

For further information see

• www.superh.com
• www.eembc.org

About SuperH, Inc.

SuperH, Inc. is a semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) licensing company and is the leading supplier of multimedia RISC CPU cores to companies building system-on-chip (SoC) products.

SuperH, Inc. develops RISC CPU cores, the SuperHyway Bus on-chip interconnect and software development tools. The SuperHTM family today includes the 32-bit SH-4 and 64- bit SH-5 CPU cores and is ideally suited to multimedia applications that require a single CPU core executing a mix of general purpose code and DSP algorithms. SuperH CPU cores are targeted at consumer, automotive, telecom and handheld multimedia appliance markets with specific emphasis on set top box, residential gateway, car information systems, modems, digital camera and multimedia players.

Further information about SuperH, Inc. and SuperH products can be found at www.superh.com.

SuperH is a trademark owned by Renesas Technology Corp. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

About EEMBC

EEMBC develops and certifies real-world benchmarks and benchmark scores to help designers select the right embedded processors for their systems. Every processor submitted for EEMBC® benchmarking is tested for parameters representing different workloads and capabilities in communications, networking, consumer, office automation, automotive/industrial, embedded Java, and microcontroller-related applications. With members including leading semiconductor, intellectual property, and compiler companies, EEMBC establishes benchmark standards and provides certified benchmarking results through the EEMBC Certification Labs (ECL) in Texas.