Thanks to LinkedIn ARM Based Group community manager Stephan Cadene, we’ve got several pointers to useful documents describing many aspects of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor core. This is all in preparation for many discussions of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor taking place next week at ARM TechCon 2011, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
The first document is from Texas Instruments and is a PDF titled “Going ‘beyond a faster horse’ to transform mobile devices.” Taken directly from the PDF: “The Cortex-A15 processor takes mobile computing to the “next level,” as it offers a substantial performance increase due to several key design enhancements compared to the previous generation Cortex-A9 processor. The Cortex-A15 processor also provides several key new features that support more advanced system-level support, including extended physical addressing extension, hardware virtualization, improved debug/trace, soft-fault recovery and AMBA 4 bus that enables system coherency.”
For a more detailed technical look at the design of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor core, here’s a PDF of a slide deck titled “Exploring the Design of the Cortex-A15 Processor” presented by Travis Lanier, Senior Product Manager at ARM. From the slide deck: “The Cortex-A15 extends the application processor family with a dramatic increase in single-thread and overall performance; compelling new features, functionality enable exciting OEM products; and scalability for large-scale computing and system-on-chip integration.” Another ARM slide deck, “Cortex-A5 to Cortex-A15” further describes many of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor core features.
Finally, for hard-core processor architectural junkies, here’s a short 1-page comparison of the ARM Cortex-A family architectures from a pipeline-depth perspective.
The ARM Cortex-A15 appears to be the processor core of choice for next-generation mobile SoC design. The first ARM slide deck listed above shows Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, and Broadcom already on the ARM Cortex-A15 bandwagon. Time to jump on board?
PS: If there are any facets of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor core you’d like for me to investigate at ARM TechCon 2011 next week, please note them in a comment below.
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