ARM Cortex-A9

The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is a 32-bit multi-core processor that provides up to 4 cache-coherent cores, each implementing the ARM v7 architecture instruction set. It was introduced in 2007.

Features

Key features of the Cortex-A9 core are:

• Out-of-order speculative issue superscalar execution 8-stage pipeline giving 8.50DMIPS/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 (0–4MB).
• Multi-core processing.

ARM states that the TSMC 40G hard macro implementation typically operates at 2GHz; a single core (excluding caches) occupies less than 1.5mm2 when designed for a 65 nanometer (nm) generic process and can be clocked at speeds over 1GHz, consuming less than 250mW per core. Without the limit of power consumption, the A9 can reach 3.1GHz, on a proof-of-concept 28 nm chip.

Chips

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, EN7530
• NXP Semiconductors (Formerly Freescale) QorIQ Layerscape LS1024A
• Freescale Semiconductor i.MX6
• HiSilicon K3V2 -Hi3620
• 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

Systems on a chip

See also

• ARM architecture
• List of ARM cores
• List of applications of ARM cores
• Comparison of ARMv8-A cores
• JTAG

External links

ARM Holdings

Other

• , YouTube.