原文出自:http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a15.php
Cortex-A15 Processor
![Cortex-A15 Processor Image](http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-203.png)
Overview
The ARM Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ processor delivers unprecedented processing capability, combined with low power consumption to enable compelling products in a wide range of new and existing ARM markets ranging from mobile computing, high-end digital home, servers and wireless infrastructure.
In mobile configurations, the Cortex-A15 processor delivers twice the performance of smartphones based on the Cortex-A9 processor. In advanced infrastructure applications, the Cortex-A15 running at up to 2.5GHz enables highly scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets.
The Cortex-A15 processor is built around the ARMv7A architecture and ensures full software compatibility with the rest of the highly acclaimed Cortex-A processors. This enables immediate access to an established developer and software ecosystem including Android™, Adobe® Flash® Player, Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu, along with more than 1000 ARM Connected Community™ members providing applications software, hardware and software development tools, middleware and SoC design services.
To achieve the very best performance, the Cortex-A15 processor has a multi-issue, out-of-order superscalar pipeline with a tightly-coupled low-latency, ECC-protected, Level-2 cache which can be up to 4MB in size. Now able to address 1TB of physical memory, the Cortex-A15 processor is able to meet the needs of server and networking applications.
World-class performance leadership is brought to a new level with ARM's unique big.LITTLE technology. A big.LITTLE configuration pairs a high-performance core like the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor with a power-optimized companion core, like the Cortex-A7 processor using a fabric like Corelink™ CCI-400. This paring solves the contradictory challenges of increasing performance while increasing battery life, by ensuring that the right processor core is assigned to the right task. Paired with advanced fabric technology like Corelink CCN-504, the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor is the engine that powers not just smart phones but also the infrastructure that smart phones rely on. From servers to networking to your high end digital home entertainment systems, the Cortex-A15 processor is the right solution for a very diverse set of solutions.
Applications:
- Advanced Smartphones
- Mobile Computing
- High-end Digital Home Entertainment
- Wireless Infrastructure
- Low-power Servers
The growing complexity of the Web2.0 centric devices is creating the requirement for devices to support multiple software personalities and combine disparate functionality. For this reason the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor includes technology from ARM that enables efficient handling of the complex software environments including full hardware virtualization, Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) addressing up to 1TB of memory as well as error correction capability for fault-tolerance and soft-fault recovery.
The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor is the first ARM processor to incorporate highly efficient hardware support for data management and arbitration of virtualized software environments and their applications to simultaneously access the system capabilities. This enables the realization of devices that are robust, with virtual environments that are isolated from each other.