6. Get to know the ARM family

Let’s look at a picture first: Figure 1-1:

Figure 1-1

It seems that the above are all related to ARM, but what are they respectively?

In fact, the above nouns can be divided into three categories:

1. Chip: 6410, 210, 2440.

2. ARM core: arm11, A8, arm9

3. Instruction architecture: armv7, armv6

So we can simplify the "flower" above: Figure 1-2:

Figure 1-2

But are the three of them related? Chip, ARM core, instruction architecture.

2440 chip: Figure 1-3:

Figure 1-3

It can be seen that the 2440 chip contains the ARM9TDMI core.

6410 chip: Figure 1-4:

Figure 1-4

You can see that the 6410 chip contains the ARM1176JZF-S core

210 chip: Figure 1-5:

Figure 1-5

The 210 chip contains the CortexA8 core.

From the above, we can know the relationship between the chip and the core.

Searching for ARMv4 in the ARM9 core manual yields the following: Figure 1-6:

Figure 1-6

It can be seen that the ARM9TDMI core is based on the ARMv4T architecture.

ARM11 is the ARMv6 architecture

CortexA8 is ARMv7 architecture

The evolution of the ARM core: Figure 1-7:

Figure 1-7

From the evolution of the ARM core above, the ARM series ended after ARM11. The Cortex series has been upgraded from Cortex-M0 to the current Cortex-A9. It can be noted that the Cortex series is also divided into three types: M, R and A series.

M series: Mainly aimed at the industrial control field, it has no operating system and can be understood as a single-chip microcomputer, but its performance is much better than that of a single-chip microcomputer.

R series: Mainly for real-time applications and can run operating systems.

A series: mainly for multimedia applications, such as mobile phones.

In terms of performance, ARM7 is similar to Cortex-M3.

ARM9 and Cortex-R4 are similar.

ARM11 is between Cortex-A5 and Cortex-R4.

Parameters of the three chips: