In the spring, Arm introduced the Cortex-A 78 – processor cores supporting the Mali-G 78 graphics chip and the Ethos-N 78 with NPU. According to the company, its customers have exported a new generation of processor cores outside their traditional markets and now the company has released a new version of the Cortex-A 78 core to support these efforts.

Cortex-A 78 C is a new, more robust member of the A 78 nuclear family. A 78 Perhaps the most significant difference to C over other family models is the upgraded DynamIQ unit, which now supports the concatenation of up to eight large cores in parallel instead of the traditional 4 to 4 big.LITTLE configurations. . Processor cores can be configured with 32 or 64 kilobyte L1i and L1d caches, 256 or 512 with an L2 cache of KB and twice the L3 cache of a maximum of 8 MB compared to the base version. In addition to the 8-core, the 6-core model was also listed in the company’s example configurations.

Due to the different operating environment, Arm has also added new security features to the C-core of Cortex-A 78. Pointer Authentication (PAC) is a feature specifically designed against Return-Oriented-Programming and Jump-Orientated-Programming (BOP, JOP) attacks. According to the company, PAC significantly reduces potential attack routes; the number of usable BOB attack routes should now be 60 and JOP attack routes %) less, than without PAC technology.

The Cortex-A 78 C is especially designed for lightweight, always-on devices such as laptops and 2-in-1 devices. However, the company did not provide information on possible system circuits using new cores, but leaves it to its partners.

Source: Arm