ARM has introduced the 32-bit Cortex-M7 processor core – the highest performance member of the energy-efficient Cortex-M processor family. Soon-to-be-arriving MCUs have already been announced by Atmel, STMicroelectronics, and Freescale. The core will deliver about 1/3 more processing power than a Cortex-M4 – using the same chip geometry – and is said to yield 5 CoreMark/MHz.
The ARMv7-M architecture chip uses a 64-bit AMBA4 AXI bus and AHB peripheral port. It has a 0 to 64 Kbyte instruction cache 2-way associative with optional ECC, a 0 to 64 kbyte data cache 4-way associative with optional ECC, and 0 to 16 Mbyte instruction and data tightly coupled memories (TCM), both with optional ECC. It also has the Nested Vector Interrupt Controller – with 8 to 256 priority levels. The core offers DSP functionality with single 16- & 32-bit MACs, 8/16-bit SIMD arithmetic, and hardware divide (2-12 Cycles), with single and double precision floating point units.
Debug features include JTAG & Serial-Wire ports, up to 8 breakpoints and 4 watchpoints. Also available are instruction and data trace (ETM), data trace (DWT), and instrumentation trace (ITM) functions. The M7 is code compatible with the M4. The three Cortex partners mentioned above have limited samples available now and expect production chips in Q1 2015.
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