ARM Cortex-A7

The ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore is a 32-bit microprocessor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture announced in 2011.

Overview


It has two target applications; firstly as a smaller, simpler, and more power-efficient successor to the Cortex-A8. The other use is in the big.LITTLE architecture, combining one or more A7 cores with one or more Cortex-A15 cores into a heterogeneous system. To do this it is fully feature-compatible with the A15.

Key features of the Cortex-A7 core are:
 * Partial dual-issue, in-order microarchitecture with an 8-stage pipeline
 * NEON SIMD instruction set extension
 * VFPv4 Floating Point Unit
 * Thumb-2 instruction set encoding
 * Jazelle RCT
 * Hardware virtualization
 * Large Page Address Extensions (LPAE)
 * Integrated level 2 Cache (0–1 MB)
 * 1.9 DMIPS / MHz
 * Typical clock speed 1.5 GHz

Chips
Several system-on-chips (SoC) have implemented the Cortex-A7 core, including:
 * Allwinner A20 (dual-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)
 * Allwinner A31 (quad-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU)
 * Allwinner A83T (octa-core A7 + PowerVR SGX544 GPU)
 * Allwinner H3(quad-core A7 + Mali-400 MP2 GPU)
 * Broadcom BCM23550 quad-core HSPA+ Multimedia Processor
 * Broadcom BCM2836 (quad-core A7 + VideoCore IV GPU), designed specifically for Raspberry Pi 2
 * NXP Semiconductor (Formerly Freescale) QorIQ Layerscape LS1 (dual-core A7)
 * Freescale i.MX 6 UltraLite
 * HiSilicon K3V3, big.LITTLE architecture with dual-core Cortex-A7 and dual-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T658 GPU.
 * Marvell PXA1088 (quad-core A7 + Vivante GC1000)
 * Mediatek MT6570 (dual-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP1 GPU)
 * Mediatek MT6572 (dual-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP1 GPU)
 * Mediatek MT6580 (quad-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU)
 * Mediatek MT6582 (quad-core A7 + ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU)
 * Mediatek MT6589 (quad-core A7 + Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 GPU)
 * Mediatek MT6592 (octa-core A7 + ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU)
 * Mstar MSB2531A ARM Cortex A7 32bit 800MHZ
 * Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 and Snapdragon 400 MSM8212 and MSM8612, MSM8226, MSM8626 and MSM8926 (quad core A7 + Adreno 305 GPU)
 * Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5410), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.
 * Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (5420), big.LITTLE architecture with quad-core Cortex-A7 and quad-core Cortex-A15. Use ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU.
 * STMicroelectronics STM32MP13x (single-core A7)
 * STMicroelectronics STM32MP15x (dual-core A7 + M4 + Vivante GPU)
 * ASPEED AST2600 BMC (dual-core A7 + M4)