Evolution of ARM

The ARM is well known for its variety of cores in the embedded market, it
provides an ocean of choices among its cores letting the designers choose
according to their applications ranging from low power cores in the
automation market to high-performance cores in the Defense and avionic
sectors. At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the silicon valleys in
and across the world have adopted to the ARM architectures inside their
silicons. This has enabled the designers to go with the ARM cores in their
design vice versa ARM has to expand their cores to fulfil the requirements of
the designers. Even though there are a huge number of cores coined into
the embedded market by the ARM, it has never let loose of the segregation
processors which will help young designers to get into the right path with
right designs.
:
 The cortex family has three main categories which are namely

Cortex-A (Application Processor cores)

Cortex-R (Real Time Application cores)
Cortex-M (Microcontroller Cores)

Cortex-A

Cortex-A stands for Application processor cores which are widely used in
performance-intensive applications and this will be put to best use while
used with the applications related to the Android and Linux operating
systems. Cortex-A series offers a wide range of cores starting from Cortex-A5
to Cortex-A77, each core is designed in a way to fit into a wide range of
applications. The first Cortex-A release was Cortex-A8 in 2005 and the latest
:
 one was Cortex-A77 in 2019.

The Cortex-A series applications start

from handsets, smartphones,
computers to high-end broadcasting
and networking equipment, the cores
behind this magic all are started with a
series of processors A5, A7, A8, A9, A12,
A15 and later ARM has renamed Cortex-
A12 to Cortex-A17 based on the ARM v7
architecture. When used with a perfect
combination these cores provide peak-
performance and high power efficiency.

Cortex-A5 is the basic version of all the Cortex-A processors with low power
consumption and desirable performance capabilities allowing the designers
to go for it without a second thought at the same time the silicon cost is also
a major factor for the wide usage of this core. Cortex-A5 is also compatible
with the other cores in the series such as Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15.

Cortex-A7 is similar in power

consumption when compared with
the A5 but shows 20percent higher
performance. This core is highly used
in the smartphones and tablet
devices to achieve a moderately
desirable performance with high
power efficiency as these handheld
device industries show their main
interest in power efficiency. At the
same time, this is also compatible
with the A15 and A17. This type of multicore configuration is often referred by
ARM as big.LITTLE Processing Configuration, where a high-performance core
such as A15 and a power-efficient core A5 are combined to achieve a
sustainable system environment in the making of Premium to luxury
handsets. Most of the ARM cores achieve a better result while subjected to
this big.LITTLE methodology rather than using as a single-core system. In
the early 2000s, there’s a big gap in the battery technology in the
:
 smartphones designers tend to use this big.LITTLE methodology often to
achieve significant results. Even nowadays the battery technology is behind
the peak performance capabilities of the ARM cores which is enabling the
designers to go for multicore configuration in most of their designs.

Coming to the high-performance Cortex-A cores starting from A15, A17 and
other A53, A35 series, these cores are used in the Luxury handsets with
multicore configuration and whereas A17 can be configured with up to 4
core combination. With all these flexible options Cortex-A series has taken
over the mobile market with an exponential growth both in the production
and performance of the core.

The recent releases of

the cortex-A series made
their entry into the low-
power server
technologies making
them as the only option
available in the market
to achieve better
performance and low-
power at a time. These
cortex-A50 series are built on ARMv8 architectures with the support of Arm
64bit architecture to enable energy-efficient 64bit execution alongside with
the 32bit execution.

Cortex-R

Cortex-R is the least well-known series offering in terms of derivatives and

apparently smallest ARM processor too. Though the tech behind the cortex-
R is unimaginably the best, But the scope for these processors is less due to
the narrow bandwidth of the applications when compared to the other
cortex series applications. These cortex-R series mostly target on real-time
applications such as automotive, medical and server-side applications in the
communication equipment.
:
 To understand the cortex-R series
briefly we should peek less into the
technology and more into the
applications. Just like Cortex-A series
cortex-R too does it’s best in the
performance intensity applications. We
can also consider this as a high-end
microcontroller but targets larger
systems than you would typically use in
a standard MCU. The applications of the
Cortex-R are completely failproof are we
can call them as sensitive applications
in which the entire system failure can
occur when this cortex-R fails. Such as
airbags and brake system in the automotive applications, critical ECG graphs
in the medical equipment, transmission controls in networking equipment,
total system failures in the server-side technologies are the few examples for
the cortex-R applications.

Cortex-R4 is the best example for the automotive applications with a clock
frequency up to 600MHz, has an 8stage pipeline with dual-issue and low
latency interrupt system that can interrupt multi-cycle operations to serve
the incoming interrupt. Cortex-R4 can also be implemented in the dual-core
configuration with another R4 being in a redundant lock-step configuration
which enables logic for fault detection and ultimately making it as an ideal
safety-critical system.

Cortex-R5 is widely used in the networking and data storage applications

with an increase in the efficiency, reliability and enhanced error
management in the real-time systems when compared to the cortex-R4.
Just like R4 this also can be implemented as a lock-step dual-core system
with the other individual processors. The dual-cores in the cortex-R series
result in the very powerful and flexible systems with enhanced error
management and real-time responses.

The cortex-R7 comes with an increased performance clock ticking at the

frequency of 1GHz. This series has come up with multiple options for the
multi-core configurations as well as lock-step. It also has a fully integrated
:
 generic interrupt controller (GIC)
supporting complex priority-based
interrupt handling. Even though
there are endless possibilities in this
domain, this series of processors are
not suitable for the rich operating
systems such as android and Linux.

Cortex-M

The Cortex-M is the famous microcontroller series which is ruling the world
with its flexibility in mending with the designer’s applications. cortex-M is
built on the ARMv7 architecture and the smallest microcontroller Cortex-
M0+ is built on the ARMv6 architecture. The first Cortex-M was released in
2004 namely Cortex-M3 and the latest one in the series is Cortex-M35P (2018)
in which P stands for physically Secure.

In 2004 immediately after the first

Cortex-M series release, many silicon
vendors picked up the core for
producing as an MCU. Soon after it hit
the market most of the designers
started using it for their designs and at
the same time migrated their previous
projects to the Cortex-M based
microcontrollers. The introduction of
Cortex-M into the already crowded
microcontroller market has made a
huge impact and resulted in a spike in
the possibilities.

The cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 are very similar cores with a 3 stage pipeline
and multiple 32-bit busses, clock speed up to 200MHz. The cortex-M4 is also
specifically optimized to handle DSP algorithms and also consumes 3 times
less power compared to the cortex-M3 but for any other applications which
are not using DSP or FPU capabilities both the cores perform at the same
level and consumes the same power. By this, you can conclude that, if you
are not working with any such applications you can go for Cortex-M3 but if
:
 you are into the DSP and FPU applications better to go with the Cortex-M4.

In the case of cost-sensitive applications and those who are migrating from
8-bit to 32-bit, cortex-M0+ is the best choice to choose from. The cortex-M0+
performance is almost closer to that of Cortex-M3 but is still compatible with
most of its big brothers in the family. The cortex-M0 is also having a
dedicated bus for the single-cycle GPIO which helps you in the
implementation of the certain interfaces like you would do on the 8-bit
microcontroller but with a performance of the 32-bit core to process the
data. The lever of debug information you can get from a Cortex-M0+ is
significantly high when compared to the 8-bit MCU, this makes the
designers go for it which will help them solve the bugs in an easier way.

Conclusion

The best way of understanding these 3 cores is far simpler than we ever
thought, let’s have a glance to get a clear view.

The cortex-A stands for Application which will help in performance-intensive

applications such as Android, Linux and many other applications related to
handsets, tablets, desktops and laptops.

The Cortex-R stands for the real-time application which is used in the safety-
:
 critical applications and where we need real-time responses of the system
such as Automotive, medical, defence, avionics and server-side technologies
where data related operations are executed.

The Cortex-M stands for the Microcontroller which is used in most of our
daily life applications also starting from the automation to DSP applications,
sensors, smart displays, IoT applications and many more. The cortex-M series
is an ocean of possibilities with a large number of probabilities and
configurations.
:
: