ARM Cortex-A7

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

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:

Chips

Several system-on-chips (SoC) have implemented the Cortex-A7 core, including:

List of ARM microarchitectures

This is a list of microarchitectures based on the ARM family of instruction sets designed by ARM Holdings and 3rd parties, sorted by version of the ARM instruction set, release and name. ARM provides a summary of the numerous vendors who implement ARM cores in their design.Keil also provides a somewhat newer summary of vendors of ARM based processors. ARM further provides a chart displaying an overview of the ARM processor lineup with performance and functionality versus capabilities for the more recent ARM core families.

ARM cores

Designed by ARM

Designed by third parties

These cores implement the ARM instruction set, and were developed independently by companies with an architectural license from ARM.

ARM core timeline

The following table lists each core by the year it was announced.

See also

References

Further reading

ARM Cortex-A57

The ARM Cortex-A57 is a microarchitecture implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings. The Cortex-A57 is an out-of-order superscalar pipeline. It is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores (e.g. GPU, display controller, DSP, image processor, etc.) into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).

Overview

Tor (anonymity network)

Tor is free software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is an acronym derived from the original software project name The Onion Router, however the correct spelling is "Tor", capitalizing only the first letter. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user: this includes "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms". Tor's use is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.

Onion routing is implemented by encryption in the application layer of a communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. Tor encrypts the data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address. Because the routing of the communication is partly concealed at every hop in the Tor circuit, this method eliminates any single point at which the communicating peers can be determined through network surveillance that relies upon knowing its source and destination.

Arm (disambiguation)

An arm is an upper limb of the body.

Arm or ARM may also refer to:

Geography

Science and medicine

Technology

Computing

ARM11

ARM11 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings.

Overview

The ARM11 microarchitecture (announced 29 April 2002) introduced the ARMv6 architectural additions which had been announced in October 2001. These include SIMD media instructions, multiprocessor support and a new cache architecture. The implementation included a significantly improved instruction processing pipeline, compared to previous ARM9 or ARM10 families, and is used in smartphones from Apple, Nokia, and others. The initial ARM11 core (ARM1136) was released to licensees in October 2002.

The ARM11 family are currently the only ARMv6-architecture cores. There are, however, ARMv6-M cores (Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M1), addressing microcontroller applications; ARM11 cores target more demanding applications.

Differences from ARM9

In terms of instruction set, ARM11 builds on the preceding ARM9 generation. It incorporates all ARM926EJ-S features and adds the ARMv6 instructions for media support (SIMD) and accelerating IRQ response.