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

References

External links

1. ARM Holdings

2. ARM Cortex-A9 Technical Reference Manuals

3. Other

4. White paper - The ARM Cortex-A9 Processors

5. RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era

6. STMicroelectronics SPEAr1310 Data brief

7. RM Cortex-A9

8. Popular ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore & Multi-core processor videos, YouTube.

9. ARM Assembly language