ARM Cortex-A7


The ARM Cortex™-A7 MPCore™ processor is the most efficient application processor ARM has ever developed and dramatically extends ARM’s low-power leadership in future entry level smart phones, tablets and other advanced mobile devices. The architecure and feature set of the Cortex-A7 processor are identical to the Cortex-A15 processor, with differences in the Cortex-A7 processor's microarchitecture focused on providing optimum energy efficiency, enabling the two processors to operate in tandem in a big.LITTLE configuration to provide the ultimate combination of high-performance with ultra low power consumption.
As a standalone processor, the Cortex-A7 will enable entry level smartphones at below $100 price point in the 2013-2014 timeframe that are equivalent to a $500 high-end smarphone in 2010. These entry level smartphones will redefine connectivity and internet usage in the developing world.





The ARM Cortex™-A7 MPCore™ processor is the most efficient application processor ARM has ever developed and dramatically extends ARM’s low-power leadership in future entry level smart phones, tablets and other advanced mobile devices. The architecure and feature set of the Cortex-A7 processor are identical to the Cortex-A15 processor, with differences in the Cortex-A7 processor's microarchitecture focused on providing optimum energy efficiency, enabling the two processors to operate in tandem in a big.LITTLE configuration to provide the ultimate combination of high-performance with ultra low power consumption.
As a standalone processor, the Cortex-A7 will enable entry level smartphones at below $100 price point in the 2013-2014 timeframe that are equivalent to a $500 high-end smarphone in 2010. These entry level smartphones will redefine connectivity and internet usage in the developing world.

Overview

The Cortex-A7 processor is a highly energy efficient applications processor designed to enable low-cost, fully featured entry-level smart phones in addition to other low-power applications.
The processor is fully compatible with other Cortex-A series processor and incorporates all of the features of the high-performance Cortex-A15 processor including virtualization, large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) NEON advanced SIMD, and AMBA 4 ACE coherency.
A single Cortex-A7 processor can deliver 5x energy-efficiency, 50% greater performance and is one fifth the size of the ARM Cortex-A8 processor, which powers many of today’s most popular smartphones.
  • Best power-efficiency and footprint as a standalone applications processor
    • More performance than 2011 mainstream smartphone CPU
    • Up to 20% more performance while consuming 60% less power
  • Companion CPU to Cortex-A15 to enable big.LITTLE Processing
    • Software can run on an energy efficient Cortex-A7 processor
    • And also on a high performance Cortex-A15 processor as needed
    • Without recompilation !
    • AMBA 4 ACE coherency interface enables sub-20us context migration between big and LITTLE CPU clusters

    Performance improvements in the Cortex-A7 CPU Design

  • Integrated L2 cache
    • Lower transaction latencies
    • Improved OS support for L2 cache maintenance due to simplified software control
    • Designed with a low power approach
      • Consecutive tag-data lookup and fixed 8 way-set associativity balances performance against lookup energy
      • External request on L2 miss – non-speculative to reduce energy
  • Branch prediction improvements
    • BTIC caches fetches after a direct branch, hides branch shadow on tight loops
  • Improved memory system performance
    • 64b Load Store path, improves integer and NEON performance over Cortex-A5 (32b path)
    • 128b AMBA 4 buses improves bandwidth 
    • Increased TLB size (256 entry, up from 128 entry for Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A5)
      • Increases performance for large workloads like web browsing



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