Girish Mahajan (Editor)

ARM Cortex A7

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Produced
  
2013

Microarchitecture
  
ARMv7-A

L1 cache
  
8–64 KB/8–64 KB

Designed by
  
ARM Holdings

Cores
  
1–8

L2 cache
  
Optional, up to 1 MB

ARM Cortex-A7

The ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore is a 32-bit microprocessor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture announced in 2011.

Contents

Overview

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 pipeline
  • NEON SIMD instruction set extension
  • VFPv4 Floating Point Unit
  • Thumb-2 instruction set encoding
  • Jazelle RCT
  • Hardware virtualization
  • Large Page Address Extensions (LPAE)
  • Integrated level 2 cache (0–1 MB)
  • 1.9 DMIPS / MHz

    • Chips

    Several 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 2
  • Freescale Layerscape LS1 (dual-core A7)
  • Freescale i.MX 6 UltraLite
  • HiSilicon 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 800MHZ
  • Qualcomm 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.

    • References

    ARM Cortex-A7 Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA