Porting to Arm 64-bit
This White Paper is an introduction to porting existing code to the A64 instruction set supported by Armv8-A processors like the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 from Arm.
By Chris Shore
This white paper is an introduction to porting existing code to the A64 instruction set supported by Armv8-A processors like the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 from Arm. It will also be useful for those writing new code for these platforms.
Why 64-bit?
It seems that is a question with many answers! For some, it will be the need to address more than 4GB of memory, for others the need for wider registers and greater accuracy of 64-bit data processing, for still others the attraction of a larger register set.
Whatever your reason for looking to move to 64-bit, it is likely that you will have a body of legacy software which will need porting as well as new code which needs writing. This paper is designed to help with both processes.
We’ll start with a quick look at the evolution of the Arm architecture which has brought 64-bit to reality.
By Chris Shore
Re-use is only permitted for informational and non-commercial or personal use only.
