Support for the MPC5554 (e200z6 core)

[David Brown]

Hi,

I have a customer who is looking at using a Freescale MPC5554 in an 
application, and is looking for appropriate tools.  I've been having a 
look at the Lite edition of the CodeSourcery PPC gcc toolset. 
Unfortunately, I've run into a big problem.

The MPC5554 uses the e200z6 core, which is fairly similar to the e300c2 
core supported by the "-mcpu=e300c2" flag.  The problem with both these 
cores is that they support hardware floating point for single precision 
arithmetic using the "SPE" (Signal Processing Extension) instructions, 
with the floating point data held in general purpose registers - they do 
not support the Book E floating point registers and instructions.  My 
problem is that I cannot get gcc to generate spe instructions for 
hardware floating point code.

Does anyone know if current gcc versions support using spe instructions 
for hardware floating point, or if there is likely to be any support 
soon?  If I can't find a way to generate the spe instructions from gcc, 
I'm going to have to recommend my customer buys Code Worrier...

mvh.,

David Brown
WesControl a.s
Norway.