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 FPGAAMLogic AML8726-MApple A5, A5XBroadcom BCM11311 (Persona ICE)Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000Entropic EN7588Freescale Semiconductor i.MX6HiSilicon K3V2 -Hi3620Marvell Avastar 88W8787, used in the Sony PlayStation VitaMediaTek MT6575 (single core), MT6577 (dual core)Mindspeed Technologies Mindspeed Comcerto 2000Nufront NuSmart 2816, 2816M, 115Nvidia Tegra 2 (without NEON extensions), Tegra 3 and Tegra 4iTrident Microsystems 847x/8x/9x SoC familyRenesas Electronics RZ/A1H,M,L,LU FamilySamsung Exynos 4210, 4212, 4412, 4415Rockchip RK3066, RK292x, RK31xxSTMicroelectronics SPEAr1310, SPEAr1340ST-Ericsson Nova A9500, NovaThor U8500, NovaThor U9500Texas Instruments OMAP4 processorsTexas Instruments Sitara AM437xWonderMedia WM8850, WM8950 and WM8980Xilinx Extensible Processing PlatformZiiLABS ZMS-20
