HP's PA7100LC: a low-cost superscalar PA-RISC processor

HP has designed a new low-cost, superscalar PA-RISC processor including two integer ALU's, floating-point coprocessor, and a memory and I/O controller on a single VLSI chip. It implements the full PA-RISC1.1 functionality and adds several new features, including little-endian capability, uncacheable memory pages, and new multimedia instructions. The chip is fabricated in 0.8 micron, 3-level metal CMOS and is designed to run from 0-75 MHz. The cache system consists of an off-chip combined instruction/data cache ranging from 8K to 2MBytes and a small on-chip instruction buffer. Memory consists of 4MB to 3GBytes of standard DRAM's or SIMM's connecting directly to the processor chip. The chip achieves performance levels comparable to previous generation high-end workstations while lowering overall system cost and power consumption to enable a new generation of low-cost systems.