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Overview

Main article: Comparison of ARMv7-A cores

It has two target applications; firstly as a smaller, simpler, and more power-efficient successor to the Cortex-A8. The other use is in the big.LITTLE architecture, combining one or more A7 cores with one or more Cortex-A15 cores into a heterogeneous system.² To do this it is fully feature-compatible with the A15.

Key features of the Cortex-A7 core are:

• Partial dual-issue, in-order microarchitecture with an 8-stage pipeline³
• NEON SIMD instruction set extension
• VFPv4 Floating Point Unit
• Thumb-2 instruction set encoding
• Jazelle RCT
• Hardware virtualization
• Large Page Address Extensions (LPAE)
• Integrated level 2 Cache (0–1 MB)
• 1.9 DMIPS / MHz⁴
• Typical clock speed 1.5 GHz⁵

Chips

Several system-on-chips (SoC) have implemented the Cortex-A7 core, including:

• Allwinner A20 (dual-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)⁶
• Allwinner A31 (quad-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU)⁷
• Allwinner A83T (octa-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544 GPU)⁸
• Allwinner H3(quad-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)⁹
• Broadcom BCM23550 quad-core HSPA+ Multimedia Processor¹⁰
• Broadcom BCM2836 (quad-core A7 + VideoCore IV GPU), designed specifically for Raspberry Pi 2¹¹
• Broadcom BCM6846 (dual-core A7) Broadband SoC¹²
• NXP Semiconductor (Formerly Freescale) QorIQ Layerscape LS1 (dual-core A7)
• Freescale i.MX 6 UltraLite
• HiSilicon K3V3, big.LITTLE architecture with dual-core Cortex-A7 and dual-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T658 GPU.
• Marvell PXA1088 (quad-core A7 + Vivante GC1000)¹³
• Mediatek MT6570 (dual-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP1 GPU)
• Mediatek MT6572 (dual-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP1 GPU)
• Mediatek MT6580 (quad-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU)
• Mediatek MT6582 (quad-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU)
• Mediatek MT6589 (quad-core A7 + Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 GPU)
• Mediatek MT6592 (octa-core A7 + ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU)
• Mstar MSB2531A ARM Cortex A7 32bit 800MHZ
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 and Snapdragon 400[broken anchor] MSM8212 and MSM8612, MSM8226, MSM8626 and MSM8926 (quad core A7 + Adreno 305 GPU)
• Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5410), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.
• Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5420), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU.
• STMicroelectronics STM32MP13x (single-core A7)
• STMicroelectronics STM32MP15x (dual-core A7 + M4 + Vivante GPU)
• ASPEED AST2600 BMC (dual-core A7 + M4)

See also

• Electronics portal

• ARM architecture
• Comparison of ARMv7-A cores
• JTAG
• List of applications of ARM cores
• List of ARM cores

External links

• Official website
• Cortex-A7 Technical Reference Manuals

• Cortex-A7 instruction cycle timings

References

1. Ryan Whitwam (2011-10-21), ARM Cortex-A7 offers a microdot-sized glimpse into the future of mobile processors, ExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/101081-arm-cortex-a7-offers-a-microdot-sized-glimpse-into-the-future-of-mobile-processors ↩

2. "big.LITTLE Processing". ARM Holdings. Archived from the original on 2012-10-22. Retrieved 2012-10-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20121022055646/http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/bigLITTLEprocessing.php ↩

3. Anand Lal Shimpi (2011-10-19). "ARM's Cortex A7: Bringing Cheaper Dual-Core & More Power Efficient High-End Devices". AnandTech. Retrieved 2012-10-17. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4991/arms-cortex-a7-bringing-cheaper-dualcore-more-power-efficient-highend-devices ↩

4. Anand Lal Shimpi (2011-10-19). "ARM's Cortex A7: Bringing Cheaper Dual-Core & More Power Efficient High-End Devices". AnandTech. Retrieved 2012-10-17. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4991/arms-cortex-a7-bringing-cheaper-dualcore-more-power-efficient-highend-devices ↩

5. Anand Lal Shimpi (2011-10-19). "ARM's Cortex A7: Bringing Cheaper Dual-Core & More Power Efficient High-End Devices". AnandTech. Retrieved 2012-10-17. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4991/arms-cortex-a7-bringing-cheaper-dualcore-more-power-efficient-highend-devices ↩

6. "AllWinner Publishes A31 and A20 Processors Details". CNXSoft. December 9, 2012. Archived from the original on December 12, 2012. Retrieved 2012-12-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20121212052710/http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/12/09/allwinner-a31-and-a20-processors-details/ ↩

7. "A31". Allwinner Technology. Archived from the original on 2016-02-21. Retrieved 2016-02-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20160221101940/http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/clq/processora/A31.html ↩

8. "A83T". Allwinner Technology. Archived from the original on 2016-02-10. Retrieved 2016-02-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20160210121052/http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/clq/processora/AllwinnerA83T.html ↩

9. "H3". Allwinner. Retrieved 2016-11-04. http://www.allwinnertech.com/index.php?c=product&a=index&id=47 ↩

10. "BCM23550". Broadcom. Archived from the original on 2013-10-29. https://web.archive.org/web/20131029004818/http://www.broadcom.com/products/Cellular/3G-Baseband-Processors/BCM23550 ↩

11. Upton, Eben. "Raspberry Pi 2 on sale now at $35". Raspberry Pi Foundation. Archived from the original on 11 April 2015. Retrieved 3 February 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150411203545/https://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/ ↩

12. Zhang, William. "arm: bcmbca: add bcm6846 SoC support". https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/t/ ↩

13. "PXA1088". Marvell Technology Group. Archived from the original on 2013-05-12. https://web.archive.org/web/20130512222415/http://www.marvell.com/communication-processors/pxa1088/ ↩