The Cortex-M3 is the first core that ARM has developed specifically for the embedded microcontroller market. It has single cycle multiply and hardware division making it excellent for applications requiring computational performance. For the first time with an ARM core, the STM32 MCU also has the ability to manipulate I/O’s and RAM at the bit level. Another significant innovation with the Cortex-M3 core is the Thumb-2 instruction set which gives 32-bit performance with 16-bit code density.