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Hardware Reference Manual 79
Intel
®
IXP2800 Network Processor
Intel XScale
®
Core
Intel XScale
®
Core 3
This section contains information describing the Intel XScale
®
core, Intel XScale
®
core gasket, and
Intel XScale
®
core Peripherals (XPI).
For additional information about the Intel XScale
®
architecture refer to the Intel XScale
®
Core
Developers Manual available on Intel’s Developers web site (http://www.developer.intel.com).
3.1 Introduction
The Intel XScale
®
core is an ARM* V5TE compliant microprocessor. It has been designed for high
performance and low-power; leading the industry in mW/MIPs. The Intel XScale
®
core
incorporates an extensive list of architecture features that allows it to achieve high performance.
Many of the architectural features added to the Intel XScale
®
core help hide memory latency that
often is a serious impediment to high performance processors.
This includes:
• The ability to continue instruction execution even while the data cache is retrieving data from
external memory.
• A write buffer.
• Write-back caching.
• Various data cache allocation policies that can be configured different for each application.
• Cache locking.
All these features improve the efficiency of the memory bus external to the core.
ARM* Version 5 (V5) Architecture added floating point instructions to ARM* Version 4. The Intel
XScale
®
core implements the integer instruction set architecture of ARM* V5, but does not
provide hardware support of the floating point instructions.
The Intel XScale
®
core provides the Thumb instruction set (ARM* V5T) and the ARM* V5E DSP
extensions.