Cortex-A15 Processor

The ARM Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ processor is the highest-performance licensable processor the industry has ever seen. It delivers unprecedented processing capability, combined with low power consumption to enable compelling products in markets ranging from smartphones, tablets, mobile computing, high-end digital home, servers and wireless infrastructure. The unique combination of performance, functionality, and power-efficiency provided by the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor reinforces ARM’s clear leadership position in these high-value and high-volume application segments.

Overview

The ARM Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ processor delivers unprecedented processing capability, combined with low power consumption to enable compelling products in a wide range of new and existing ARM markets ranging from mobile computing, high-end digital home, servers and wireless infrastructure.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor is the latest member of the Cortex-A series of processors, ensuring full application compatibility with all of the other highly acclaimed Cortex-A processors. This enables immediate access to an established developer and software ecosystem including Android™, Adobe® Flash® Player, Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu, along with more than 700 ARM Connected Community™ members providing applications software, hardware and software development tools, middleware and SoC design services.  

The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor has an out-of-order superscalar pipeline with a tightly-coupled low-latency level-2 cache which can be up to 4MB in size. Additional improvements in floating point and NEON™ media performance result in devices that deliver the next-generation user experience for consumers as well as high-performance computation for web infrastructure applications. 

It is expected that mobile configurations of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor will deliver over five times the performance of today’s advanced smartphones. In advanced infrastructure applications, the Cortex-A15 running at up to 2.5GHz will enable highly scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets

Applications:

• Advanced Smartphones
• Mobile Computing
• High-end Digital Home Entertainment
• Wireless Infrastructure
• Low-power Servers

The growing complexity of the Web2.0 centric devices is creating the requirement for devices to support multiple software personalities and combine disparate functionality. For this reason the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor introduces new technology from ARM that enables efficient handling of the complex software environments including full hardware virtualization, Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) addressing up to 1TB of memory as well as error correction capability for fault-tolerance and soft-fault recovery.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor is the first ARM processor to incorporate highly efficient hardware support for data management and arbitration, enabling multiple software environments and their applications to simultaneously access the system capabilities. This enables the realization of devices that are robust, with virtual environments that are isolated from each other.

By ARM