
2
MPC7457 RISC Microprocessor Hardware Specifications
MOTOROLA
Features
Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the MPC7457. The core is a high-performance superscalar design
supporting a double-precision floating-point unit and a SIMD multimedia unit. The memory storage
subsystem supports the MPX bus protocol and a subset of the 60x bus protocol to main memory and other
system resources. The L3 interface supports 1, 2, or 4 Mbytes of external SRAM for L3 cache and/or private
memory data. For systems implementing 4 Mbytes of SRAM, a maximum of 2 Mbytes may be used as
cache; the remaining 2 Mbytes must be private memory.
Note that the MPC7457 is a footprint-compatible, drop-in replacement in a MPC7455 application if the core
power supply is 1.3 V.
1.2
Features
This section summarizes features of the MPC7457 implementation of the PowerPC architecture.
Major features of the MPC7457 are as follows:
High-performance, superscalar microprocessor
— As many as four instructions can be fetched from the instruction cache at a time.
— As many as three instructions can be dispatched to the issue queues at a time.
— As many as 12 instructions can be in the instruction queue (IQ).
— As many as 16 instructions can be at some stage of execution simultaneously.
— Single-cycle execution for most instructions
— One instruction per clock cycle throughput for most instructions
— Seven-stage pipeline control
Eleven independent execution units and three register files
— Branch processing unit (BPU) features static and dynamic branch prediction
– 128-entry (32-set, four-way set-associative) branch target instruction cache (BTIC), a cache
of branch instructions that have been encountered in branch/loop code sequences. If a target
instruction is in the BTIC, it is fetched into the instruction queue a cycle sooner than it can
be made available from the instruction cache. Typically, a fetch that hits the BTIC provides
the first four instructions in the target stream.
– 2048-entry branch history (BHT) with two bits per entry for four levels of
prediction—not-taken, strongly not-taken, taken, and strongly taken
– Up to three outstanding speculative branches
– Branch instructions that do not update the count register (CTR) or link register (LR) are
often removed from the instruction stream.
– Eight-entry link register stack to predict the target address of Branch Conditional to Link
Register (bclr) instructions
— Four integer units (IUs) that share 32 GPRs for integer operands
– Three identical IUs (IU1a, IU1b, and IU1c) can execute all integer instructions except
multiply, divide, and move to/from special-purpose register instructions
– IU2 executes miscellaneous instructions including the CR logical operations, integer
multiplication and division instructions, and move to/from special-purpose register
instructions