ARM7

ARM7 cores were released from 1993 to 2001 and no longer recommended for new IC designs; newer alternatives are ARM Cortex-M cores. This generation introduced the Thumb 16-bit instruction set providing improved code density compared to previous designs. The most widely used ARM7 designs implement the ARMv4T architecture, but some implement ARMv3 or ARMv5TEJ. ARM7TDMI has 37 registers (31 GPR and 6 SPR). All these designs use a Von Neumann architecture, thus the few versions containing a cache do not separate data and instruction caches. Some ARM7 cores are obsolete. One historically significant model, the ARM7DI is notable for having introduced JTAG based on-chip debugging; the preceding ARM6 cores did not support it.