The Arm® cortex® A53 processor offers a balance between performance and power-efficiency. Cortex-A53 is capable of seamlessly supporting 32-bit and 64-bit instruction sets. It makes use of a highly efficient 8-stage in-order pipeline enhanced with advanced fetch and data access techniques for performance. It fits in a power and area footprint suitable for entry-level smartphones. It also can deliver high aggregate performance in scalable enterprise systems via high core density, which accounts for its popularity in basestation and networking designs.

The Cortex-A53 delivers significantly higher performance than the highly successful Cortex-A7, in a similar low-cost footprint. Like the Cortex-A7, it is capable of deployment as a standalone applications processor or in combination with a high-end Cortex-A CPU using Arm big.LITTLE??chnology. It is less than half the size of the high-end Cortex-A processors, and between 2 and 3 times more efficient, while still delivering performance equivalent or higher than the Cortex-A9 processor that powered high-end smartphones just a few years ago. This blend of efficiency and performance enables affordable smartphone and consumer devices with substantial compute power in the lowest power and area footprint.

The Cortex-A53 supports the full Arm v8-A architecture. It not only runs 64-bit applications also seamlessly and efficiently runs legacy Arm 32-bit applications.

This processor can also be implemented in an Arm big.LITTLE configuration, for example with the Cortex-A72 processor.