ARM Cortex-A9 Overview

Cortex-A9 Overview

The ARM Cortex-A9 processor provides unprecedented levels of performance and power efficiency making it an ideal solution for designs requiring high performance in low power or thermally constrained cost-sensitive devices. Available as either a single core or configurable multicore processor, with both synthesizable or hard-macro implementations available. This processor can scale across a wide variety of applications while enabling a consistent software investment across multiple markets.

The Cortex-A9 processors are the highest performance ARM processors implementing the full richness of the widely supported ARMv7 architecture. Designed around the most advanced, high efficiency, dynamic length, multi-issue superscalar, out-of-order, speculating 8-stage pipeline, the Cortex-A9 processors deliver unprecedented levels of performance and power efficiency with the functionality required for leading edge products across the broad range of consumer, networking, enterprise and mobile applications.

The Cortex-A9 microarchitecture is delivered within either a scalable multicore processor, the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor, or as a more traditional processor, the Cortex-A9 single core processor. Supporting the configuration of 16, 32 or 64KB four way associative L1 caches, with up to 8MB of L2 cache through the optional L2 cache controller, the scalable multicore processor and the single processor provide the broadest flexibility and are each suited to specific applications and markets. The Cortex-A9 processors provide a scalable solution across a wide range of market applications from mobile handsets through to high-performance consumer and enterprise products by sharing the common requirements of:

• Increased power efficiency with higher performance for lower power consumption
• Increased peak performance for most demanding applications
• Ability to share software and tool investments across multiple devices