The Cortex-A75 is a high performance core targeted at advanced use cases, including reliability, safety, machine learning and security, where ASIL D levels of performance are required. Alongside a 20% single thread performance improvement over the Cortex-A73 core, the A75 offers a three way superscalar processor and a private L2 cache per core, each running at core speed.
Meanwhile, the Cortex-A55 is a mid range processor said to improve power efficiency by a factor of 2.5 and to support higher sustained performance. According to ARM, the core is available in up to 3000 possible configurations, including 1 to 8 cores, optional L2 and L3 caches, cryptography and FPU. With an improved branch predictor and data prefetcher, the core is said to offer ‘the right size compute for any need’ in mobile, consumer, automotive and infrastructure applications.
ARM says it has also improved its big.LITTLE approach. Smythe noted: “In mobile, this can create a wide range of possibilities. Every core can be different and big and LITTLE cores can be mixed. The impact is going to be significant.”
According to ARM, 20% more performance can be expected from the A75 when used in as a ‘big’ core, while the A55 will offer a 10% improvement in power efficiency when used as a ‘LITTLE’ core.
