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ARM licenses their technology at several different levels:
* An ''architectural'' licensee has the right to develop their own implementation of a particular ARM architecture. Apple (A7+ CPU) and Applied Micro (X-Gene) fall into this category. These chips execute standard ARMv8A software, but because the designs are prepared by the licensees, the performance profiles may be different from those of other manufacturers and those designed by ARM - for example, branch prediction and pipelining may be different, and some instructions will be slower while other instructions are faster than the corresponding ARM-designed devices. Therefore, optimizations may have different effects. To perform appropriate optimizations for a particular implementation, a compiler can use a "cost table" which contains information about the performance of specific instructions, enabling the compiler to pick the optimal combination of instructions for a particular operation.
* A ''design'' licensee has the right to produce devices using one or more of ARM's chip designs. This requires far less expertise on the part of the licensee, and allows what is basically a cut-and-paste of the standard ARM core(s) into the chip design that the licensee is working on. This enables the licensee to focus on the other IP (intellectual property) blocks on the chip, such as GPUs, memory controllers, radios (cellular, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, zigbee, and so forth), accelerators, and various peripherals. Most ARM licensees fall into this category. Current standard ARM chip designs are designated "Cortex" - the Cortex-A5, A7, A8, A9, A12, A15, and A17 are ARMv7-A 32-bit designs, and the Cortex-A35, A53, A57, A72 , A73, A75, and A72 A76 are ARMv8-A 32/64-bit designs.
=== System-on-a-Chip Implementations ===
Most SoCs offer more features than are used in any one system and more features than can be exposed on the pins which are physically present on the chip. A pin multiplexor system, or PinMux, is used to select which signals are currently exposed on the SoC's pins. For example, a given group of pins could be used for an SPI serial interface, or an I<sup>2</sup>C serial interface, or as general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connections, but are only connected to one of those functions at a time.
In addition, a number of SoCs use high-speed serial interfaces for multiple purposes -- a pool of 40 multi-gigabit-per-second serial interfaces can might be provided, for example, and it is up to the board designer to decide how many of those interfaces to use as the lanes of a PCIe bus, gigabit (or faster) ethernet ports, or as SATA ports.
The operating system kernel has the required mechanisms to set up the PinMux as needed for a given board, and to connect serial controllers to the appropriate drivers. In order to do this, it is critical that the kernel receive not only an accurate description of the SoC, but also an accurate description of how that SoC is wired up in the current system. This information is passed in via a Device Tree or an ACPI description (ACPI is mandated by the SBSA specification for servers).
* Early ARM chips had numbers that were different from the corresponding architecture levels. For example, the ARM11 processor is an ARMv6 chip, which is much lower-performing than other parts with lower numbers, including the ARMv7-level Cortex-A5, -A7, -A8, and -A9 devices.
* Cortex designations are not in order of release date, features, or power consumption, and are only loosely in order by performance. Cortex-A8 (single-core only) and Cortex-A9 (available in single- and multi-core) are some of the older designs in the series; Cortex-A15 chips add hardware virtualization support. The ARMv7 (32 bit) Cortex-A12, Cortex-A7, and Cortex-A5 designs followed, with varying power/performance profiles. Cortex-A35, -A53, -A55, -A57, -A72, -A73, -A75, and -A76 chips are ARMv8A.
* Other companies have introduced chips with confusingly similar designations. The Apple A7 chip is /A8/A9/A10/... chips are not an ARM design designs and has have nothing to do with the similarly-named Cortex-A7 /-A9/... (or any other Cortex corecores); it the Apple A7, for example, is roughly in the same performance category as a dual-core Cortex-A53. Allwinner and AMD have also used chip designations starting with A (Allwinner A10, A20, and A80, and AMD Opteron A1100, for example); these are unrelated to the Apple A-series chips and to the Cortex A designations. Likewise, the Nvidia K1 is unrelated to the AMD K12.
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