The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture. It is a multicore processor providing up to 4 cache-coherent cores.
Key features of the Cortex-A9 core are:
Out-of-order speculative issue superscalar execution 8-stage pipeline giving 2.50 DMIPS/MHz/core.
NEON SIMD instruction set extension performing up to 16 operations per instruction (optional).
High performance VFPv3 floating point unit doubling the performance of previous ARM FPUs (optional).
Thumb-2 instruction set encoding reduces the size of programs with little impact on performance.
TrustZone security extensions.
Jazelle DBX support for Java execution.
Jazelle RCT for JIT compilation.
Program Trace Macrocell and CoreSight Design Kit for non-intrusive tracing of instruction execution.
L2 cache controller (0–4 MB).
Multi-core processing.
ARM states that the TSMC 40G hard macro implementation typically operating at 2 GHz; a single core (excluding caches) occupies less than 1.5 mm2 when designed in a TSMC 65 nanometer (nm) generic process and can be clocked at speeds over 1 GHz, consuming less than 250 mW per core.
Several system on a chip (SoC) devices implement the Cortex-A9 core, including:
Altera SoC FPGA
AMLogic AML8726-M
Apple A5, A5X
Broadcom BCM11311 (Persona ICE)
Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000
Entropic EN7588
Freescale Semiconductor i.MX6
HiSilicon K3V2 -Hi3620
Marvell Avastar 88W8787, used in the Sony PlayStation Vita
MediaTek MT6575 (single core), MT6577 (dual core)
Mindspeed Technologies Mindspeed Comcerto 2000
Nufront NuSmart 2816, 2816M, 115
Nvidia Tegra 2 (without NEON extensions), Tegra 3 and Tegra 4i
Trident Microsystems 847x/8x/9x SoC family
Renesas Electronics RZ/A1H,M,L,LU Family
Samsung Exynos 4210, 4212, 4412, 4415
Rockchip RK3066, RK292x, RK31xx
STMicroelectronics SPEAr1310, SPEAr1340
ST-Ericsson Nova A9500, NovaThor U8500, NovaThor U9500
Texas Instruments OMAP4 processors
Texas Instruments Sitara AM437x
WonderMedia WM8850, WM8950 and WM8980
Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform
ZiiLABS ZMS-20
