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 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 operates 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.
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 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
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
ARM Holdings
ARM Cortex-A9 Technical Reference Manuals
Other
White paper - The ARM Cortex-A9 Processors
RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era
TI OMAP4440 specs
STMicroelectronics SPEAr1310 Data brief
RM Cortex-A9
Popular ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore & Multi-core processor videos, YouTube. ARM Assembly language