Cortex-A7 instruction cycle timings - Hardwarebug (original) (raw)

The Cortex-A7 ARM core is a popular choice in low-power and low-cost designs. Unfortunately, the public TRM does not include instruction timing information. It does reveal that execution is in-order which makes measuring the throughput and latency for individual instructions relatively straight-forward.

The table below lists the measured issue cycles (inverse throughput) and result latency of some commonly used instructions.

It should be noted that in some cases, the perceived latency depends on the instruction consuming the result. Most of the values were measured with the result used as input to the same instruction. For instructions with multiple outputs, the latencies of the result registers may also differ.

Finally, although instruction issue is in-order, completion is out of order, allowing independent instructions to issue and complete unimpeded while a multi-cycle instruction is executing in another unit. For example, a 3-cycle MUL instruction does not block ADD instructions following it in program order.