ARM Cortex-A12

The ARM Cortex-A12 is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture. It provides up to 4 cache-coherent cores. The Cortex-A12 is a successor to the Cortex-A9.^[2]

ARM Cortex-A12

General information
Designed by	ARM Holdings
Cache
L1 cache	32–64 KiB I, 32 KiB D
L2 cache	256 KiB–8 MiB (configurable with L2 cache controller)
Architecture and classification
Instruction set	ARMv7-A
Physical specifications
Cores	1–4
Products, models, variants
Product code name	Owl[1]
History
Predecessor	ARM Cortex-A9
Successor	ARM Cortex-A17

ARM renamed A12 as a variant of Cortex-A17 since the second revision of the core in early 2014, because they were indistinguishable in performance.^[3][4]

Overview

Main article: Comparison of ARMv7-A cores

ARM claims that the Cortex-A12 core is 40 percent more powerful than the Cortex-A9 core.^[5] New features not found in the Cortex-A9 include hardware virtualization and 40-bit Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) addressing. It was announced as supporting big.LITTLE,^[6] however shortly afterwards the ARM Cortex-A17 was announced as the upgraded version with that capability.^[7]

Key features of the Cortex-A12 core are:^[8]

• Out-of-order speculative issue superscalar execution pipeline giving 3.00 DMIPS/MHz/core.
• NEON SIMD instruction set extension.
• High performance VFPv4 floating point unit.
• Thumb-2 instruction set encoding reduces the size of programs with little impact on performance.
• TrustZone security extensions.
• L2 cache controller (0-8 MB).
• Multi-core processing.
• 40-bit Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) addressing up to 1 TB of RAM.
• Hardware virtualization support.

See also

• Electronics portal

• ARM architecture
• Comparison of ARMv8-A cores
• JTAG
• List of applications of ARM cores
• List of ARM cores