Cortex-A9 MPCore Hard Macro

Feature-rich consumer and enterprise devices require very high levels of processor performance in the tight power envelopes necessary for compact, high-density and thermally constrained environments. To meet these requirements ARM has combined high-performance processor and fabric IP with optimized ARM physical IP to develop two multi GHz-level Cortex-A9 MPCore  hard macro implementations to provide very high performance within a leadership power profile.

The two Cortex-A9 MPCore hard macro implementations for the TSMC 40nm-G process, enable silicon manufacturers to have a rapid and low risk route to silicon for high-performance, low-power Cortex-A9 processor-based devices. The speed-optimized hard macro implementation will enable devices to operate at frequencies greater than 2GHz.

The dual core hard macros are the result of significant development investment in physical IP by ARM combined with its broad processor and fabric IP portfolio and leading-edge implementation flows from the EDA industry. Advanced physical IP techniques have enabled critical circuits within the design to be replaced with highly tuned logic cells and memories, increasing performance while lowering overall power consumption.

Speed Optimized
The Cortex-A9 speed-optimized hard macro implementation will provide system designers with an industry standard ARM® processor incorporating aggressive low-power techniques to further extend ARM’s performance leadership into high-margin consumer and enterprise devices within the power envelope necessary for compact, high-density and thermally constrained environments. This hard macro implementation operates in excess of 2GHz when selected from typical silicon and represents an ideal solution for high-margin performance-oriented applications.  

Power Optimized
In many thermally constrained applications such as set-top boxes, DTVs, printers and other feature-rich consumer and high-density enterprise applications, energy efficiency is of paramount importance. The Cortex-A9 power-optimized hard macro implementation delivers its peak performance of 4000 DMIPS while consuming less than 250mW per CPU when selected from typical silicon.

The hard macros include ARM AMBA®-compliant high performance system components to maximise data traffic speed and minimise power consumption and silicon area.  Each Cortex-A9 hard macro also implements the CoreSight™ Program Trace Macrocell (PTM) which provides full visibility into the processor’s instruction flow, enabling the software community to develop code for optimal performance. 

Both ARM dual core Cortex-A9 hard macros will share a common seven-power domain, dual-NEON™ technology configuration supporting SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) operating systems with up to 8MB of Level2 cache memory and will be delivered with all scripts, vectors and libraries required to integrate the macro directly within any SoC device.

To enable the development of high-efficiency, low risk SoCs using other Cortex-A9 processor configurations, ARM also provides the silicon-proven SoC-level ARM Physical IP platform used to build these hard macros, and a range of AMBA-compliant system development components and tools