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To: Amy J who wrote (84950)	7/6/1999 7:30:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 186894

Amy, A very interesting product from fujitsu. Should be ideal for set top boxes and IA's in general. Quite stunning price/performance/power features: Fujitsu rolls VLIW architecture By Anthony Cataldo EE Times (07/06/99, 3:59 p.m. EDT) TOKYO — Fujitsu Ltd. has announced a new very long instruction word (VLIW) processor that it will sell as both a stand-alone device and as a system-on-a-chip core for its 0.18-micron process technology. Based on VLIW expertise that Fujitsu has already applied to its supercomputers, the FR-V processor, code-named Venus, will be available in two flavors and will target a wide-range of consumer, communications and automotive applications. The FR-V architecture supports 16-bit instructions, 32-bit integers, media instructions, digital signal instructions and floating-point instructions. The floating-point instruction set is based on the IEEE 754 specification. The FR-V architecture supports instruction-level parallelism, so multiple instructions can be processed simultaneously. There will be two cores, each of which can be customized for a targeted application. Performance for the high-end FR500 core is 500 million instructions per second (Mips), 4,300 million operations per second (Mops) for application processing and 1,000 million floating-point operations per second (Mflops). The FR500 is designed for media-rich processing applications such as video compression. It consumes 1 watt of power. The FR300 core functions as a low-power DSP for applications such as cellular phones. It provides 500-Mops performance for application processing while consuming 25 milliwatts of power. Fujitsu hopes the FR300 will be used by cellular phone manufacturers now designing next-generation wideband CDMA phones, which will start to roll out in 2001. One processor, for example, will be able to perform voice compression/decompression and serve as a video codec for MPEG-4 videoconferencing in a wireless handset, a Fujitsu spokesman said. The FR-V development environment is based on an advanced version of a vector compiler used in Fujitsu supercomputers that will allow programmers to write applications in high-level C/C++ rather than in assembly code. Fujitsu will begin offering a standalone 266-MHz FR500 processor for about $50 by the end of 1999, and expects volume production devices will be priced between $17 and $25. The first samples of the FR300 will be available in late 2000, and will sell for $8 and $12 in volume quantities. Fujitsu hopes sales for the processors will reach more than $800 million for calendar year 2002. Fujitsu is also open to licensing its VLIW cores to other companies, a company spokesman said. Future plans call for the development of a processor with a frequency greater than 500 MHz, and for reducing power consumption to 0.05 milliwatts/Mops using 0.1-micron process technology. The company also plans to increase the number of simultaneous operations and their combinations in VLIW.