Targeted at the PC marketplace, MediaGX uses a hardware and software combination to provide VGA quality graphics. MediaGX is an integrated processor that targets display operations. The Hewlett Packard PA-8000 is the first product based upon the PA 2.0 architecture. Processor hardware can schedule instruction execution through the use of an instruction reorder buffer, which allows execution of instructions as the data become available, regardless of the order in which they were fetched. Cache lines can be loaded in to the buffer at the rate of four instructions per cycle.
Data cache is dual ported, with each port able to process a double word per cycle.
The PA-8000 implements speculative fetching of data, with hardware support for instruction path prediction. Up to four PA-8000 processors can share the Runway bus. This design has forced the use of expensive, 4.5 sec. SRAMs to maintain promised performance. Each queue can perform dynamic scheduling of instructions.