Intended to provide an upgrade path for those using Cortex-A5 and A7 cores, the A32 is said to support ‘ultra high efficiency’, with 25% more efficiency than available from an A7 with lower power consumption.
Amongst features claimed for the part is the availability of more than 100 new 32bit instructions, enhanced floating point performance, faster software encryption and better media performance. In fact, the A32 appears to excel at the latter functions, according to figures supplied by ARM. Streaming performance is said to be more than five times better than that offered by an A5, while cryptography is improved by more than 13 times. TrustZone security is available, as is a Cordio radio block and a Mali GPU.
The core can be synthesised to meet performance applications or to meet area needs. In its quad core version, with a NEON SIMD engine and an FPU, the A32 runs in excess of 1GHz and consumes less than 75mW per core. When stripped down to a single core, the A32 requires less than 0.25mm2 of silicon on a 28nm process, consuming less than 4mW at 100MHz. Both versions feature the 128bit AMBA AXI4 bus.
