What do we mean by architecture?
When we use the term architecture, we mean a functional specification. In the case of the Arm architecture, we mean a functional specification for a processor. An architecture specifies how a processor will behave, such as what instructions it has and what the instructions do.
You can think of an architecture as a contract between the hardware and the software. The architecture describes what functionality the software can rely on the hardware to provide. Some features are optional, as we will discuss later in the section on micro-architecture.
The architecture specifies:
Instruction set |
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Register set |
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Exception model |
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Memory model |
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Debug, trace, and profiling |
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