Datasheet

Floating-point Support

5.1 About floating-point support

The ARM floating-point environment is an implementation of the IEEE 754 standard

for binary floating-point arithmetic. See IEEE 754 arithmetic on page 5-30 for details

of the ARM implementation of the standard.

An ARM system might have:

•a Vector Floating-Point (VFP) coprocessor

•a Floating-Point Accelerator (FPA) coprocessor

• no floating-point hardware.

If you compile for a system with a hardware coprocessor (VFP or FPA), the compilers

make use of it. If you compile for a system without a coprocessor, the compilers

implement the calculations in software.

For example, the compiler option

-fpu vfp

selects a hardware VFP coprocessor and the

option

-fpu softvfp

selects coprocessor instructions are to be implemented in software.