ARM Cortex-A72
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. It is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores into one die constituting a system on a chip. 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.
Overview
- 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
- 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 + 48 KiB instruction L1 cache per core
- Integrated low-latency level-2 cache controller, 512 KB to 4 MB configurable size per cluster
- 48-entry fully associative L1 instruction translation lookaside buffer 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
- Broadcom BCM2711 system on a chip with four A72 cores. Used in the Raspberry Pi 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, RK3576
- AWS Graviton