SuperH

From Free net encyclopedia

The SuperH (or SH) is a microprocessor architecture. The SuperH core is RISC based and found in a large number of embedded systems.

The SuperH family was first developed by Hitachi as the successor to the H8 Family and the design was outsourced to the newly-formed SuperH Inc., owned by Hitachi and ST Microelectronics. SuperH Inc now sells the designs of the CPU cores. Renesas Technology manufactures and sells the SuperH family. See under Renesas.

The SH-5 design added a SIMD Instruction Set called SHmedia and also supports the SHcompact instruction set, equivalent to the user-mode parts of the SH-4 instruction set. This is similar to the Thumb Instruction Set of ARM.

The older designs are now supported and sold by Renesas.

The family includes:

SH-1 - 32-bit with maximum of 20MHz. (As used on Sega Saturn to control the CD-drive and to check the Copy Protection on the game's CD.)
SH-2 - 32-bit with up to 28.7MHz. (As used in the Sega Saturn and Sega 32X.)
SH-3 - 32-bit with up to 200MHz. This spring introduced a MMU to the SH Family. (As used in many Windows CE devices.)
SH-4 - 32-bit dual-issue core with a 128-bit vector FPU. (As used in the NAOMI architecture and its derivatives, such as Atomiswave and the Dreamcast console.)
SH-5 - 64-bit core with a 128-bit vector FPU (64 32-bit registers) and an integer unit which includes the SIMD support and 63 64-bit registers. (The 64th register is hard-wired to zero.)