Yah a bit of merger madness, NEC Electronics has merged with Renesas, further consolidating the Japanese microcontroller market. This will put the new company third in global IC sales, behind only Intel and Samsung.  It will be interesting to see which products survive the merger, as there will be some overlap.

What does this mean for CPU collectors? Just as happened when Mitsubishi and Hitachi merged, deprecated and eliminated devices will become increasingly hard to find data on.

Source: EE Times

The SuperH line of microcontrollers (really full up processors now) was originally developed by Hitachi.  They have found wide use in applications spanning printer controllers to automobile control systems.  Renesas just announced yet another member of the SuperH family. The SH7264 and SH7262 both include the now common SH-2A RISC core running at 144MHz as well as a FPU, but now integrate up to 1Mbyte of SRAM on die as well as many video functions.

Renesas SuperH SH7264 and SH7262

These chips can now drive displays without the need of external RAM, saving cost, and board space.  Expect to see them in such things as car navigation systems, copy machines and the like.

Source: eeProductCenter

Automotive computing in manyways is similar to your personal computer, and the same inherent problems.  On your PC it is good to have the OS  isolated from the normal applications (especially the internet browser). Same thing in your car, you do not want the navigation and media player functions to be able to interfere or crash the control computer.  This is why most cars have DOZENS of computers.  Renesas has just announced the SH7776, a dual SH-4A cored CPU. One core for the information systems, and one for the control systems.  They share a common memory set, but it is segmented to prevent any problems.  Each core runs at a whopping 533MHz and can output almost 2000 MIPS.

Clearly thats not enough for Renesas, they through in a graphics core too, a PowerVR core with 3D Rendering.

Source: EEProduct Center