Designing the M·CORETM M3 CPU Architecture

The M•CORE microRISC architecture has been developed to address the growing need for long battery life among today’s portable applications. In this paper, we present the architectural enhancements of the M3 processor, the successor to the original M•CORE M2 architecture. Specifically, we discuss the instruction buffer and pipeline enhancements, the branch prediction algorithm, branch folding for small program loops, the fast integer multiplier, and several new instructions. We present performance comparisons between the M2 and M3 M•CORE processors. Finally, we also discuss two system implementations utilizing the M•CORE M3 processor. IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, Austin, Texas, October 10-13, 1999.