Overview
Key features of the Cortex-A9 core are:
- Out-of-order speculative issue superscalar execution 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 unobtrusive tracing of instruction execution.
- L2 cache controller (0-4 MB).
- Multi-core processing.
ARM states that the TSMC 40G hard macro implementation typically operating 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.
Read more about this topic: ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore