William R. Bryg

PA7200: a PA-RISC processor with integrated high performance MP bus interface

A new processor implementing Hewlett-Packards PA-RISC 1.1 (Precision Architecture) has been designed. This latest design incorporates many improvements over the HP PA7100 CPU, including increased frequency, instruction and data cache prefetching, enhanced superscalar execution, and enhanced multiprocessor support. The PA7200 connects directly to a new split transaction, 120 MHz, 64-bit bus capable of supporting multiple processors and multiple outstanding memory reads per processor. A novel fully associative on-chip data cache, which is accessed in parallel with an external data cache, is used to reduce the miss rate and facilitate hardware and software directed prefetching to reduce average memory access time.<<ETX>>