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.
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