ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore

ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore

Produced	in production late 2011,[1] to market late 2012[2]
Designed by	ARM
Max. CPU clock rate	1000 MHz  to 2500 MHz
Min. feature size	32 nm/28 nm initially[3] to 20 nm roadmap[3]
Instruction set	ARMv7
Cores	1-4 per cluster, 1-2 clusters per physical chip[4]
L1 cache	64 kB (32 kB I-Cache, 32 kB D-Cache) per core
L2 cache	up to 4 MB[5] per cluster
L3 cache	none

The ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore is a multicore ARM architecture processor providing an out-of-order superscalar pipeline ARM v7 instruction set running at up to 2.5 GHz.^[6] ARM has confirmed that the Cortex A15 core is 40 percent faster than the Cortex-A9 core, all things equal.^[7] The first A15 designs taped out in the fall of 2011, but products based on the chip are not expected in the market until 2012.^[1]

Features

Key features of the Cortex-A15 core are:

• 40-bit Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) addressing up to 1 TB of RAM.^[8][9]
• 15 stage integer / 17-25 stage floating point pipeline, with out-of-order speculative issue 3-way superscalar execution pipeline.^[10]
• 4 cores per cluster, up to 2 clusters per chip with CoreLink 400 (an AMBA-4 coherent interconnect). ARM provides specifications but the foundries individually design ARM chips, and AMBA-4 scales beyond 2 clusters.
• DSP and NEON SIMD extensions onboard (per core).
• VFPv4 Floating Point Unit onboard (per core).
• Hardware virtualization support.
• 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 unobtrusive tracing of instruction execution.
• 32kB data + 32kB instruction L1 cache per core.
• Integrated low-latency level-2 cache controller, up to 4 MB per cluster.

Implementations

Implementations are only expected to sample in 2011, and none are expected to market before 2012 or 2013.

Press announcements of forthcoming implementations:

• Broadcom SoC^[11]
• Texas Instruments OMAP 5 SoCs^[12]
• ST-Ericsson Nova A9600^[13]
• Nvidia a future Tegra chip^[14]

Other licensees expected to produce an A15 design at some point are LG^[15][16] and Samsung.^[17] Although Apple is a major ARM licensee with already substantial developed ARM-based product lines (the iPad, iPhone, and iPods), no announcements have yet been made about a continuation in the form of a future cortex A15-based Apple design. It should be noted that Apple never makes any announcements^{[verification needed]} regarding its future products or roadmaps.

See also

• ARM Holdings
• ARM architecture
• ARM Cortex-A8
• ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore
• List of ARM microprocessor cores

References

1. ^ ^{a b} TI Reveals OMAP 5: The First ARM Cortex A15 SoC
2. ^ ARM Expects First Cortex-A15 Devices in Late 2012
3. ^ ^{a b} ARM Unveils Cortex-A15 MPCore Processor to Dramatically Accelerate Capabilities of Mobile, Consumer and Infrastructure Applications — in the Supporting Technology section
4. ^ CoreLink Network Interconnect for AMBA AXI
5. ^ Cortex-A15 Processor — Product description
6. ^ ARM Cortex-A15 - ARM Processor
7. ^ Exclusive : ARM Cortex-A15 "40 Per Cent" Faster Than Cortex-A9
8. ^ ARM7 40-bit, virtualization
9. ^ ARM e-mail to LINUX: Add support for the Large Physical Address Extensions
10. ^ Exploring the Design of the Cortex-A15 Processor Travis Lanier
11. ^ Broadcom announces plans for ARM's Cortex-A15 SoC | thinq
12. ^ OMAP™ Applications Processors - OMAP™ 5 Platform
13. ^ Changing the game: ST-Ericsson Unveils NovaThor™ Family of Smartphone Platforms Combining its Most Advanced Application Processors with the Latest Generation of Modems
14. ^ NVIDIA Announces "Project Denver" to Build Custom CPU Cores Based on ARM Architecture, Targeting Personal Computers to Supercomputers - NVIDIA Newsroom
15. ^ LG Electronics Licenses ARM Processor Technology to Drive - ARM
16. ^ Why LG Getting ARM Cortex A15 License Is A Big Deal | ITProPortal.com
17. ^ Market share concerns remain for TI despite the impressive OMAP 5

External links

• ARM Cortex-A15 - ARM Processor