ARM Cortex-A12

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.

Overview

ARM claims that the Cortex-A12 core is 40 percent more powerful than the Cortex-A9 core. 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, however shortly afterwards the ARM Cortex-A17 was announced as the upgraded version with that capability.

Key features of the Cortex-A12 core are:

• 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.