The ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore is a 32-bit microprocessor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture announced in 2011.
It has two target applications; firstly as a smaller, simpler, and more power-efficient successor to the Cortex-A8. The other use is in the big.LITTLE architecture, combining one or more A7 cores with one or more Cortex-A15 cores into a heterogeneous system. To do this it is fully feature-compatible with the A15.
Key features of the Cortex-A7 core are:
Partial dual-issue, in-order microarchitecture with an 8-stage pipelineNEON SIMD instruction set extensionVFPv4 Floating Point UnitThumb-2 instruction set encodingJazelle RCTHardware virtualizationLarge Page Address Extensions (LPAE)Integrated level 2 cache (0–1 MB)1.9 DMIPS / MHzSeveral system-on-chips (SoC) have implemented the Cortex-A7 core, including:
Allwinner A20 (dual-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)Allwinner A31 (quad-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU)Allwinner A83T (octa-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544 GPU)Allwinner H3 (quad-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)Broadcom BCM23550 quad-core HSPA+ Multimedia Processor Broadcom BCM2836 (quad-core A7 + VideoCore IV GPU), designed specifically for Raspberry Pi 2Freescale Layerscape LS1 (dual-core A7)Freescale i.MX 6 UltraLiteHiSilicon K3V3, big.LITTLE architecture with dual-core Cortex-A7 and dual-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T658 GPU.Marvell PXA1088 (quad-core A7 + Vivante GC1000) Mediatek MT6572 (dual-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP1 GPU)Mediatek MT6582 (quad-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU)Mediatek MT6589 (quad-core A7 + Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 GPU)Mediatek MT6592 (octa-core A7 + ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU)Mstar MSB2531A ARM Cortex A7 32bit 800MHZQualcomm Snapdragon 200 and Snapdragon 400 MSM8212 and MSM8612, MSM8226 , MSM8626 and MSM8926 (quad core A7 + Adreno 305 GPU)Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5410), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5420), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU.