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Cortex-A15 - Microarchitectures - ARM
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Cortex-A15 µarch
General Info
Arch TypeCPU
DesignerARM Holdings
ManufacturerTSMC
IntroductionSeptember 8, 2010
Instructions
ISAARMv7
Succession

Cortex-A15 (codename Eagle) is the successor to the Cortex-A9, a low-power high-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 A15 is the first microarchitecture specifically designed for high-performance, whereas the Cortex-A7, also the successor to the Cortex-A9, target high-efficiency.

The Cortex-A15 was often combined with a number of lower power cores (e.g. Cortex-A7) in a big.LITTLE configuration to achieve better energy/performance.

Compiler support

Compiler Arch-Specific Arch-Favorable
Arm Compiler -mcpu=cortex-a15 -mtune=cortex-a15
GCC -mcpu=cortex-a15 -mtune=cortex-a15
LLVM -mcpu=cortex-a15 -mtune=cortex-a15

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.

If the Cortex-A15 is coupled with the Cortex-A7 in a big.LITTLE system, GCC also supports the following option:

Compiler Tune
GCC -mtune=cortex-a15.cortex-a7

Architecture

Key changes from Cortex-A9

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

Block Diagram

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Memory Hierarchy

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Licensees

Arm named the following companies as licensees.

codenameCortex-A15 +
designerARM Holdings +
first launchedSeptember 8, 2010 +
full page namearm holdings/microarchitectures/cortex-a15 +
instance ofmicroarchitecture +
instruction set architectureARMv7 +
manufacturerTSMC +
microarchitecture typeCPU +
nameCortex-A15 +