ARM Cortex-A Series Processors

1.ARM Cortex-A Series Processors

The ARM Cortex-A series of applications processors provide a range of solutions for devices undertaking complex compute tasks, such as hosting a rich Operating System (OS) platform, and supporting multiple software applications.

2.Cortex-A Series Characteristics

All ARMv7-A and ARMv8-A based processor cores featured in the current ARM Processor Portfolio support ARM’s multicore technologies.

Single to quad-core implementation for performance orientated applications Supports symmetric and asymmetric OS implementations
Coherency throughout the processor exported to system via Accelerator Coherency Port (ACP) The big.LITTLE compatible processors extend multi-core coherence beyond the 1-4 core clusters with AMBA® 4 ACE (AMBA Coherency Extension) and AMBA 5 CHI (Coherent Hub Interface).

A number of key points are common to the Cortex-A family of devices:

• 32-bit RISC core, with 16 × 32-bit visible registers with mode-based
  register banking
• Modified Harvard Architecture (separate, concurrent access to
  instructions and data)
• Load/Store Architecture
• Thumb-2 technology as standard
• VFP and NEON options
• Backward compatibility with code from previous ARM processors
• 4GB of virtual address space and a minimum of 4GB of physical address space
• Hardware translation table walking for virtual to physical address
  translation
• Virtual page sizes of 4KB, 64KB, 1MB and 16MB. Cacheability
  attributes and access permissions can be set on a per-page basis
• Big-endian and little-endian data access support
• Unaligned access support for basic load/store instructions
• Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP) support on MPCore™ variants, that is, multi-core versions of the Cortex-A series processors, with full data coherency at the L1 cache level. Automatic cache and TranslationLookaside Buffer (TLB) maintenance propagation provides high efficiency SMP operation

3.ARM Cortex-A Series Processors

The ARM Cortex-A series of applications processors provide a range of solutions for devices undertaking complex compute tasks, such as hosting a rich Operating System (OS) platform, and supporting multiple software applications.

• Cortex-A73
• Cortex-A72
• Cortex-A57
• Cortex-A53
• Cortex-A35
• Cortex-A32
• Cortex-A17
• Cortex-A15
• Cortex-A9
• Cortex-A8
• Cortex-A7
• Cortex-A5