cortex m7 frame pointer in prologue

Hello,

 I am trying to understand how the frame pointer works because I want to unwind the stack in a HardFault handler.. 

I am looking at a dissassembly that runs perfectly for an Atmel ATSAMV71Q21 Cortex M7. It was compiled with GCC in the AtmelStudio 7 IDE. To get the frame pointer, I compiled with -fno-omit-frame-pointer -mtpcs-frame -mtpcs-leaf-frame. It looks like that GCC used register r7 for the frame poitner thumb2 mode.

The function prologue has a push, a sub and an add. I like to confirm if the Cortex M7 superscalar 6 stage pipeline waits because of the dependency on SP at instruction at code address 0x00401dce from the push at 0x00401dcc? 

Why doesn't the frame pointer point to something more predictable like the previously pushed r7 frame pointer or the previous SP value before entering the function? 

int I2cHW::endTransmission(){
  401dcc:	b5b0      	push	{r4, r5, r7, lr}       /* SAVE REGISTERS. The stack moves down by 4*8 = 32 bytes. The frame is pointer is r7, the link register is LR*/
  401dce:	b086      	sub	sp, #24			/*allocate 24 bytes on stack. Lower stack pointer by 24 bytes.*/
  401dd0:	af04      	add	r7, sp, #16      /* frame pointer = stack pointer + 16. Why???*/
  
  
  
  .... BODY REMOVED ....
  
      if (isAckValid){
  401edc:	7a63      	ldrb	r3, [r4, #9]
  401ede:	b11b      	cbz	r3, 401ee8 <_ZN5I2cHW15endTransmissionEv+0x11c>
        return 0;
  401ee0:	2000      	movs	r0, #0
    }else{
        return 1;
    }
}
  401ee2:	3708      	adds	r7, #8   /* move frame pointer by 8*/
  401ee4:	46bd      	mov	sp, r7		/* stack poitner = frame pointer*/
  401ee6:	bdb0      	pop	{r4, r5, r7, pc}  /* restore registers. move stack up by 4*8= 32 bytes*/
        return 1;
  401ee8:	2001      	movs	r0, #1
  401eea:	e7fa      	b.n	401ee2 <_ZN5I2cHW15endTransmissionEv+0x116>
  401eec:	2044f31c 	.word	0x2044f31c
  401ef0:	00451e94 	.word	0x00451e94
  401ef4:	00451de4 	.word	0x00451de4
  401ef8:	00451fac 	.word	0x00451fac
  401efc:	00451e5c 	.word	0x00451e5c
  401f00:	0044e5ed 	.word	0x0044e5ed
  401f04:	00447a71 	.word	0x00447a71
  401f08:	00440f71 	.word	0x00440f71
  401f0c:	00451f24 	.word	0x00451f24
  401f10:	00451fc4 	.word	0x00451fc4
  401f14:	00405421 	.word	0x00405421
  401f18:	00452004 	.word	0x00452004
  401f1c:	00451fec 	.word	0x00451fec