AteTools for Cortex-M4 The Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 processors are two of the products in the ARM Cortex-M processor family. The whole Cortex-M processor family is shown in Figure 1.1. The Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 processors are based on ARMv7-M architecture. Both are high-performance processors that are designed for microcontrollers. Because the Cortex-M4 processor has SIMD, fast MAC, and saturate arithmetic instructions, it can also carry out some of the digital signal processing applications that traditionally have been carried out by a separate Digital Signal Processor (DSP).