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]

ARM Cortex-A72
General information
Launched2016
Designed byARM Holdings
Cache
L1 cache80 KiB (48 KiB I-cache with parity, 32 KiB D-cache with ECC) per core
L2 cache512 KiB to 4 MiB
L3 cacheNone
Architecture and classification
Technology node16 nm
Instruction setARMv8-A
Physical specifications
Cores
  • 1–4 per cluster, multiple clusters[1]
Products, models, variants
Product code name
  • Maya
History
PredecessorARM Cortex-A57
SuccessorARM Cortex-A73

Overview

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  • 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

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Cortex-A72 Processor". ARM Holdings. Retrieved 2014-02-02.
  2. ^ Frumusanu, Andrei (3 February 2015). "ARM Announces Cortex-A72, CCI-500, and Mali-T880". Anandtech. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  3. ^ Frumusanu, Andrei (23 April 2015). "ARM Reveals Cortex-A72 Architecture Details". Anandtech. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  4. ^ "Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35". Raspberry Pi. 2019-06-24. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
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