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Arm64 allows FPU-less designs. There are some around…

• Symmetry 4y ago
  Sure. The FPU is optional on a Cortex M2, for instance. But those don't have MMUs. You'd certainly need an expensive architectural license to make something with an MMU but no FPU if you wanted to and given all the requirements ARM normally imposes for software compatibility[1] between cores I'd tend to doubt that they'd let you make something like that. [1] Explicitly testing that you don't implement total store ordering by default is one requirement I've heard people talk about to get a custom core licensed.
  • my123 4y ago
    There are arm64 designs with MMUs but not FPUs. See Cortex-R82. That [1] is wrong too. Tegra Xavier shipped with sequential consistency out of the box :)
  • masklinn 4y ago
    Apple has an architecture license (otherwise they could not design their own cores, which they’ve been doing for close to a decade), and already had the ability to take liberties beyond what the average architecture licensee can, owing to being one of ARM’s founders.