Because conventional RISC proces-
sors have insufficient processing power to sup-
port the continuing development of digital
consumer products, we need a new high-
performance processor for multimedia appli-
cations. 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.1 The FR500 is the
first product in the FR-V line, Fujitsu’s gener-
ic name for VLIW architecture microproces-
sors. 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 exe-
cution control, and conditional execution
control. We also evaluate its performance.