Arm previously announced Cortex-A35 64-bit & 32-bit lower-power CPU core, and later on Cortex-A32 32-bit only Armv8 CPU core with the usual press release, and blog posts providing details about their new offering.
But this morning, I saw a tweet about Cortex-A34…
https://twitter.com/never_released/status/1157107187375886337
Based on the twitter handle, I first assumed it was “never released” ;), and was just an internal part name at Arm. But the new Cortex-A34 was actually very discreetly outed last month when Arm announced Flexible Access to lower the barrier of entry by allowing IC designers to access all Arm IP in the program, and only pay for IP blocks they actually use in the final product.
Nevertheless, the product page and developer documentation are now up – albeit with limited info for the latter -, so we have more details.
Some of the highlights of Arm Cortex-A34 core include:
- Architecture – 64-Bit Armv8-A
- Multicore – 1-4x Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) within a single processor cluster, and multiple coherent SMP processor clusters through AMBA 4 technology
- 8-stage, in-order pipeline
- ISA Support
- AArch64 for 64-bit support and new architectural features
- TrustZone security technology
- Neon Advanced SIMD
- DSP and SIMD extensions
- VFPv4 Floating point
- Hardware virtualization support
- Debug & Trace -CoreSight SoC-400
As far as I know, Cortex-A34 is the first and only Cortex processor that will only run 64-bit code, and be incompatible with 32-bit code. [Update: Arm Cortex-A65/A65AE is also 64-bit only]
Arm states the Cortex-A34 will be found in various applications including industrial, smart home devices (home networking devices), healthcare and cloud computing.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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