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Cortex-A9 µarch
General Info
Arch Type	CPU
Designer	ARM Holdings
Manufacturer	TSMC
Introduction	October 3, 2007
Process	40 nm
Instructions
ISA	ARMv7
Succession
Cortex-A8 Cortex-A15 Cortex-A7 Cortex-A12 Cortex-A5

Cortex-A9 (codename Falcon) is the successor to the Cortex-A8, a low-power performance ARM microarchitecture designed by ARM Holdings for the mobile market. This microarchitecture is designed as a synthesizable IP core and is sold to other semiconductor companies to be implemented in their own chips.

The Cortex-A9 was later succeeded by four independent lines - high-performance (A15), mainstream performance (A12), high efficiency (A7), and ultra-low power (A5).

Compiler support

Compiler	Arch-Specific	Arch-Favorable
Arm Compiler	-mcpu=cortex-a9	-mtune=cortex-a9
GCC	-mcpu=cortex-a9	-mtune=cortex-a9
LLVM	-mcpu=cortex-a9	-mtune=cortex-a9

One can specify NEON support using the -mfpu=neon option. Note that GCC will not generate floating-point operations for auto-vectorization constructs because NEON, under ARMv7, is not fully IEEE 754-compliant. It's possible to use -funsafe-math-optimizations to circumvent that behavior.

Architecture

Key changes from Cortex-A8

• Fully synthesizable RTL (prior designs were hand/automated layout)
• 40 nm process (from 65 nm)
• New out-of-order pipeline (from in-order)
  • Shorter pipeline (9-12 stages, down from 13)
• 2x frequency (2 GHz, up from 1 GHz)
• NEON
  • Added Half precision support

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Licensees

Arm named the following companies as licensees.

• Broadcom
• Freescale
• NEC
• nVIDIA
• STMicroelectronics
• Texas Instruments
• Toshiba
• Mindspeed Technologies
• ZiiLABS
• Open-Silicon
• eSilicon
• Altera
• Xilinx