Cortex-A53

Specifications

The Cortex-A53 processor is a high efficiency processor that implements the Armv8-A architecture. 

The Cortex-A53 processor has one to four cores, each with an L1 memory system and a single shared L2 cache. It can be combined with other Cortex-A CPUs in a big.LITTLE configuration.

Armv8-A Cryptographic Extension

The Armv8 Cryptographic Extension provides instructions for the acceleration of encryption and decryption, and includes:

• Armv8.0-AES, which includes AESD and AESE instructions.
• Armv8.0-SHA, which includes the SHA1* and SHA256* instructions.

The presence of the Cryptographic Extension in an implementation is subject to export license controls. The Cryptographic Extension is an extension of the SIMD support and operates on the vector register file

The Cryptographic Extension also provides multiply instructions that operate on long polynomials. The Cryptographic Extension provides this functionality in AArch64 state and AArch32 state, and an implementation that supports both AArch64 state and AArch32 state provides the same Cryptographic Extension functionality in both states.

Characteristics

The Cortex-A53 processor delivers significantly more performance than its predecessors at a higher level of power efficiency. This takes the performance of the core above that of the Cortex-A7 processor, which defines many popular mainstream and entry-level mobile platforms. The performance graph to the right shows the performance improvements of the Cortex-A53 processor against the Cortex-A7 processor.

The Armv8-A architecture brings a number of new features. These include 64-bit data processing, extended virtual addressing and a 64-bit general purpose registers. The Cortex-A53 processor is Arm’s first Armv8-A processor aimed at providing power-efficient 64-bit processing. It features an in-order, 8-stage, dual-issue pipeline, and improved integer, Neon, Floating-Point Unit (FPU) and memory performance.

The Cortex-A53 can be implemented in two execution states: AArch32 and AArch64. The AArch64 state gives the Cortex-A53 its ability to execute 64-bit applications, while the AArch32 state allows the processor to execute existing Armv7-A applications.

Cortex-A comparison table (Armv7-A)

Cortex-A comparison (Armv8-A)