New-Tech Europe Digital Magazine | Feb 2016

improvements and power reduction, two often conflicting design goals that the Cortex-A32 team managed to deliver in tandem. The Cortex-A32 also delivers performance improvements compared to Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A7 processors. The performance improvements relative to the Cortex-A5 range from 30% to a massive1300% across a range of benchmarks relevant to embedded markets. Streaming and crypto are key benchmarks at the top end of this scale. Compared to the Cortex-A7, the Cortex-A32 offers 5% to 25% higher performance. To put things in perspective, the Cortex-A32 delivers similar performance to the Cortex-A9, which was the premium smartphone standard just a few years ago. That performance is coming to the lowest cost rich embedded devices now, and at significantly less power. For integer workloads, the combination of performance improvements and power reduction provided by the Cortex-A32 translates into a greater than 25% efficiency gain over the Cortex-A7 and more than 30% efficiency gain over the Cortex-A5. Compared to Cortex-A35, the Cortex-A32 offers same 32-bit performance but consumes 10% less power and has a 13% smaller core. This means that Cortex-A32 is 10% more efficient than Cortex-A35 processor in the 32-bit world.

both 32-bit and 64-bit compute capabilities in the AArch32 and AArch64 execution states. Cortex-A32 is optimized to support the A32/T32 instruction set in the AArch32 execution state, which is ideal for 32-bit rich embedded applications that need the lowest cost and power. Even in AArch32, ARMv8-A adds more than 100 new instructions – and the Cortex-A32 benefits from all of these. 2. Higher efficiency and performance Cortex-A32 is 25% more efficient (more performance per mW) than Cortex-A7 in the same process node. Cortex-A32 delivers this efficiency through performance

1.

ARMv8

architectural

enhancements 2. Higher efficiency and performance 3. Scalability to target diverse embedded markets Let us look at some details for each one of these key offerings. 1. ARMv8-A architectural enhancements Cortex-A32 is the only ARMv8-A processor optimised for 32-bit compute. As such, the Cortex-A32 offers an ARMv8 upgrade path for applications that today use ARMv7-A processors like Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A7 or classic ARM processors like ARM926 and ARM1176. The ARMv8-A architecture supports

Scalability Given the diversity of embedded

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