ARM Cortex-A53

ARM Cortex-A53

MediaTek MT8163V on printed circuit board of an disassembled Amazon Echo Dot
General information
Launched	2012
Designed by	ARM Holdings
Performance
Max. CPU clock rate	400 MHz  to 2.30 GHz
FSB speeds	100 MHz  to 118 MHz OC
Physical specifications
Cores	1–8 per cluster
Cache
L1 cache	8–64 KiB
L2 cache	128 KiB – 2 MiB
Architecture and classification
Instruction set	ARMv8-A
Products, models, variants
Product code name	Apollo
History
Predecessor	ARM Cortex-A7
Successor	ARM Cortex-A55

The ARM Cortex-A53 is one of the first two central processing units implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings' Cambridge design centre, along with the Cortex-A57. The Cortex-A53 is a two-wide in-order superscalar processor, capable of dual-issuing some instructions.¹ It was announced October 30, 2012² and is marketed by ARM as either a stand-alone, more energy-efficient alternative to the more powerful Cortex-A57 microarchitecture, or to be used alongside a more powerful microarchitecture in a big.LITTLE configuration. It is available as an IP core to licensees, like other ARM intellectual property and processor designs.

• 8-stage pipelined processor with 2-way superscalar, in-order execution pipeline
• DSP and NEON SIMD extensions are mandatory per core
• VFPv4 Floating Point Unit onboard (per core)
• Hardware virtualization support
• TrustZone security extensions
• 64-byte cache lines
• 10-entry L1 TLB, and 512-entry L2 TLB
• 4 KiB conditional branch predictor, 256-entry indirect branch predictor

The Cortex-A53 is the most widely used CPU microarchitecture for mobile computing systems on chip (SoCs) from 2014 to 2025, making it one of the longest-running ARM platform for mobile devices. It is currently featured in most entry-level and lower mid-range SoCs, while higher-end SoCs used the newer ARM Cortex-A55. The latest SoC still using the Cortex-A53 is the MediaTek Helio G50, which is an entry-level SoC designed for budget smartphones.

The ARM Cortex-A53 processor has been used in the LeMaker HiKey since 2015,³ the Raspberry Pi 3 since February 2016,⁴ and the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W since October 2021.⁵

The Cortex-A53 is also used in a number of Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek SoCs.⁶⁷⁸ Semi-custom derivatives of the Cortex-A53 have been used in Qualcomm's Kryo 250 and Kryo 260 CPUs.⁹¹⁰ The Starlink ground terminals utilize a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC from STMicroelectronics as a main control unit.¹¹

The processor is used in the ODROID-C2¹² and in Roku streaming media players (in the high-end models from 2016 and in all models released between 2017 and 2019). Another notable Cortex-A53 application is the Pine A64/A64+ single-board computer.

These cores are used in a 24-core SoC, the Socionext SynQuacer SC2A11.

The processor is used in Amazon Fire tablets, including the Fire HD 8 and the Fire HD 10 (the latter also includes Cortex-A72 cores). It is also used in some Amazon Echo Show models such as the Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, and Echo Show 5 (2nd Gen).¹³

The processor is used in Fortinet's Fortigate 81F entry-level firewalls.

Automotive electronic control units utilize A53 cores for vehicle network processing and high-performance real-time computations.¹⁴