SUMMARYEmbedded processors are increasingly being used in digital consumer appliances such as cellular phones, digital still/video cameras, and car navigation systems. They must therefore deliver high performance within a reasonable area and power consumption level, and be flexible to meet a wide range of requirements for various applications. In this paper, we introduce our latest processor core SH-X developed under the above background. The low-power version of the SH-X core achieves 360 MIPS with a power of 80 mW resulting in the high power-performance ratio of 4500 MIPS/W. The standard version achieves 720 MIPS with a power of 250 mW, 2.8 GFLOPS, and 36M polygons/s graphics performance. The leak currents in the resume standby and U-standby modes are 100 and 10 µA, respectively. The resume standby mode can return the status before the standby in only 3 ms, while the U-standby mode requires reset sequence to restart.