Revision as of 23:50, 21 August 2021

Cortex-A510 is an ultra-high efficiency microarchitecture designed by ARM Holdings as a successor to the Cortex-A55. The Cortex-A510, which implements the ARMv9.0 ISA, is typically found in smartphone and other embedded devices. Often A510 cores are combined with higher performance processors (e.g. based on Cortex-A710) in DynamIQ big.LITTLE configuration to achieve better energy/performance.

Note that this microarchitecture is designed as a synthesizable IP core and is sold to other semiconductor companies to be implemented in their own chips.

Process Technology

The Cortex-A510 was primarily designed to take advantage of TSMC's 7 nm, 6 nm, 5 nm as well as Samsung's 7 nm and 5 nm.

Architecture

The Cortex-A510 is a brand new ground-up CPU design. It borrows advanced processor components from Arm's high-performance cores - such as the branch prediction and prefetchers - to extract high performance from a traditional in-order core design. The Cortex-A512 is also designed to seamlessly integrate along with higher-performance cores through Arm's DynamIQ big.LITTLE technology.

Key changes from Cortex-A55

• Brand new ground-up design
  • Higher performance (Arm claims: +35% IPC (SPECint 2006) / +50% IPC (SPECfp 2006)
  • Lower power (Arm claims: -20% energy @ iso-performance / +10% performance @ iso-power)
  • Core Complex with a merged core architecture
    • Two independent cores
    • One shared vector unit
      • Configurable 64b or 128b pipe
  • Front-End
    • Wider fetch (128b/cycle, up from 64b)
    • Wider decoder (3-way, up from 2-way)
    • New branch predictors
    • New prefetchers
  • Back-End
    • In-order
  • Memory Subsystem
    • Larger L1 (32-64 KiB)
    • Larger L2 (0-512 KiB, up from 0-256 KiB)
      • 2x bandwidth L2->L3
    • Wider loads (128b/cycle, up from 64b/cycle)
    • 2x loads (2 lds/cycle, up from 1/cycle)
  • New ISA Support
    • ARMv9.0 ISA
    • SVE, SVE2 support

Block Diagram

Core Complex

Memory Hierarchy

The Cortex-A510 has a private L1I, L1D, and cluster-wide L2 cache.

• Cache
  • L1I Cache
    • Private to core
    • 32 KiB OR 64 KiB, 4-way set associative
    • 64-byte cache lines
    • Virtually-indexed, physically-tagged (VIPT) behaving as physically-indexed, physically-tagged (PIPT)
    • Single Error Detect (SED) parity cache protection
    • Pseudo-random cache replacement policy
  • L1D Cache
    • Private to core
    • 32KB or 64KB, 4-way set associative
    • Virtually-Indexed, Physically-Tagged (VIPT) behaving as Physically-Indexed, Physically-Tagged (PIPT)
    • Error Correcting Code (ECC) cache protection
    • 64-byte cache lines
    • Pseudo-random cache replacement policy
  • L2 Cache
    • Private to complex
    • 128 KiB OR 192 KiB OR 256 KiB OR 384 KiB OR 512 KiB, 8-way set associative
    • 64-byte cache lines
    • Can be configured as 1-2 slices
      • Slice includes: data RAMs, L2 tags, L2 replacement RAM, and L1 duplicate tag RAMs
      • Slice can be configured as single/dual partitions for up to two concurrent accesses to different L2 ways

The Cortex-A510 features an instruction TLB (ITLB) and data TLB (DTLB) which are private to each core and an L2 TLB that is private to the core complex.

• TLBs
  • ITLB
    • 16-entries
    • fully associative
    • TLB hits return the PA to the instruction cache
  • DTLB
    • 16-entries
    • fully associative
    • TLB hits return the PA to the data cache
  • L2 TLB
    • 8-way set associative
    • Shared by both cores in the complex

Overview

Core Complex

Core

All Cortex-A510 Processors

Bibliography

• Arm Tech Day, 2021