The ARM Cortex-A72 is a central processing unit implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings' Austin design centre. The Cortex-A72 is a 3-way decode out-of-order superscalar pipeline.[1] It is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores (e.g. GPU, display controller, DSP, image processor, etc.) into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC). The Cortex-A72 was announced in 2015 to serve as the successor of the Cortex-A57, and was designed to use 20% less power or offer 90% greater performance.[2][3]
| General information | |
|---|---|
| Launched | 2016 |
| Designed by | ARM Holdings |
| Cache | |
| L1 cache | 80 KiB (48 KiB I-cache with parity, 32 KiB D-cache with ECC) per core |
| L2 cache | 512 KiB to 4 MiB |
| L3 cache | None |
| Architecture and classification | |
| Technology node | 16 nm |
| Instruction set | ARMv8-A |
| Physical specifications | |
| Cores |
|
| Products, models, variants | |
| Product code name |
|
| History | |
| Predecessor | ARM Cortex-A57 |
| Successor | ARM Cortex-A73 |
Overview
edit- Pipelined processor with deeply out-of-order, speculative issue 3-way superscalar execution pipeline
- DSP and NEON SIMD extensions are mandatory per core
- VFPv4 Floating Point Unit onboard (per core)
- Hardware virtualization support
- Thumb-2 instruction set encoding reduces the size of 32-bit programs with little impact on performance.
- TrustZone security extensions
- Program Trace Macrocell and CoreSight Design Kit for unobtrusive tracing of instruction execution
- 32 KiB data (2-way set-associative) + 48 KiB instruction (3-way set-associative) L1 cache per core
- Integrated low-latency level-2 (16-way set-associative) cache controller, 512 KB to 4 MB configurable size per cluster
- 48-entry fully associative L1 instruction translation lookaside buffer (TLB) with native support for 4 KiB, 64 KiB, and 1 MB page sizes
- 32-entry fully associative L1 data TLB with native support for 4 KiB, 64 KiB, and 1 MB page sizes
- 4-way set-associative of 1024-entry unified L2 TLB per core, supports hit-under-miss
- Sophisticated branch prediction algorithm that significantly increases performance and reduces energy from misprediction and speculation
- Early IC tag –3-way L1 cache at direct-mapped power*
- Regionalized TLB and μBTB tagging
- Small-offset branch-target optimizations
- Suppression of superfluous branch predictor accesses
Chips
edit- Broadcom BCM2711 (used in Raspberry Pi 4[4])
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 650, 652, and 653
- NXP i.MX8, Layerscape LS1026A/LS1046A, LS2044A/LS2084A, LS2048A/LS2088A, LX2160A/LX2120A/LX2080A, LS1028A
- Texas Instruments Jacinto 7 family of automotive and industrial SoC processors.
- Rockchip RK3399
- AWS Graviton
See also
edit- ARM Cortex-A57, predecessor
- ARM Cortex-A73, successor
- Comparison of ARMv8-A cores, ARMv8 family
References
edit- ^ a b "Cortex-A72 Processor". ARM Holdings. Retrieved 2014-02-02.
- ^ Frumusanu, Andrei (3 February 2015). "ARM Announces Cortex-A72, CCI-500, and Mali-T880". Anandtech. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
- ^ Frumusanu, Andrei (23 April 2015). "ARM Reveals Cortex-A72 Architecture Details". Anandtech. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
- ^ "Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35". Raspberry Pi. 2019-06-24. Retrieved 2019-06-24.