ARM Cortex-R82

Overview

ARM Cortex-R82 is ARM's latest real-time Cortex-R core, positioned for PCIe Gen 5, 6, and 7 SSD controllers. By CoreMark/MHz it delivers an 81% per-core performance improvement over Cortex-R5 and 36% over Cortex-R8, and adds SMP support for up to 8 cores per cluster with a shared L2 cache for multicore shared memory. It moves the Cortex-R line from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing, raising the single addressable memory space from a prior 4 GB limit to up to 1 TB of onboard DRAM — enabling larger-capacity drives and more complex storage workloads. Beyond raw performance, the R82 emphasizes efficiency: at 1.15 GHz with voltage scaled 150 mV below nominal it matches Cortex-R8 performance while consuming 44% less power (18% less at 1.15 GHz nominal voltage). It integrates tightly coupled memory for single-cycle access, a CHI coherency interface enabling CXL integration, an optional MMU for running Linux natively on storage devices, and an optional Neon ML engine for near-data compute. ScaleFlux adopted the R82 as the core for its FC5116 (Gen 5) and FC6116 (Gen 6) NVMe SoCs, citing these gains as the basis for delivering Gen 6 performance under a 6.5W power budget without a smaller lithography node.