Rev. 1.50, 10/04, page 159 of 448
Section 8 Caches
The SH-4A has an on-chip 32-Kbyte instruction cache (IC) for instructions and an on-chip 32-
Kbyte operand cache (OC) for data.
Note: For the size of instruction cache and operand cache, see the hardware manual of the target
product. This manual describes the 32-Kbyte case for each cache memory.
8.1 Features
The features of the cache are given in table 8.1.
The SH-4A supports two 32-byte store queues (SQs) to perform high-speed writes to external
memory. The features of the store queues are given in table 8.2.
Table 8.1 Cache Features
Item Instruction Cache Operand Cache
Capacity 32-Kbyte cache 32-Kbyte cache
Type 4-way set-associative, virtual
address index/physical address tag
4-way set-associative, virtual
address index/physical address tag
Line size 32 bytes 32 bytes
Entries 256 entries/way 256 entries/way
Write method  Copy-back/write-through selectable
Replacement method LRU (least-recently-used) algorithm LRU (least-recently-used) algorithm
Table 8.2 Store Queue Features
Item Store Queues
Capacity 32 bytes × 2
Addresses H'E000 0000 to H'E3FF FFFF
Write Store instruction (1-cycle write)
Write-back Prefetch instruction (PREF instruction)
Access right When MMU is disabled: Determined by SQMD bit in MMUCR
When MMU is enabled: Determined by PR for each page