The ARM Cortex-A72 is a central processing unit implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings' Austin design centre.
The Cortex-A72 is a 3-way decode out-of-order superscalar pipeline.
[1] It is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores (e.g. GPU, display controller, DSP, image processor, etc.)
into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).
The Cortex-A72 was announced in 2015 to serve as the successor of the Cortex-A57, and was designed to use 20% less power or offer 90% greater performance.