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44 l New-Tech Magazine Europe
he announcement of the
ARM
®
Cortex
®
-A35 processor
marked the beginning of a new family
of ultra high efficiency application
processors from ARM. Today, ARM
announced the second member of
that family, the Cortex-A32, a new
32-bit processor. Highlights of the
Cortex-A32 include:
ARM’s smallest, lowest power
ARMv8-A processor, optimized for 32-
bit processing (supports the A32/T32
instruction set, and is fully compatible
with ARMv7-A)
Provides ultra efficient 32-bit
compute for the next generation of
embedded
products
including
consumer, wearable and IoT
applications.
In Article, I’ll provide the market
context and some highlights of the
Cortex-A32 while answering the
question: Why did we create the
Cortex-A32?
Embedded Markets
The embedded market is incredibly
diverse. It covers innumerable
products - almost everything that is
not a phone, a PC, or a server - and
spans a huge range of processing
requirements. The diversity of
requirements in embedded is well
served by the three major processor
families from ARM: Cortex-A,
Cortex-R and Cortex-M. The
fundamental differences between
the A, R, and M families are shown
next page.
Much has been written about
Cortex-M processors in the
embedded market - they are
incredibly prevelant. Less attention
has been given so far to the growing
use of Cortex-A processors in
embedded applications. This blog
focuses on these rich-embedded
applications, where a full OS is
required. These are the sweet spot
for Cortex-A.
Two fundamental aspects make rich-
embedded applications different
than the traditional embedded
applications using Cortex-R and
Cortex-M processors. The first
is rich operating system support
that requires virtual memory and
memory management unit. The
vast majority of Cortex-A based
embedded products run full virtual
memory based OSes like Linux,
Android, and Windows. The second
aspect is higher performance.
The performance needed is again
very diverse, and in some cases
embedded
applications
need
T
Introducing Cortex-A32: ARM’s smallest, lowest power ARMv8-A
processor for next generation 32-bit embedded applications
Dave Kinjal, ARM Processors