Floating Point

The ARM® architecture provides high-performance and high-efficiency hardware support for floating-point operations in half-, single-, and double-precision arithmetic. It is fully IEEE-754 compliant with full software library support.

This page describes floating-support relative to Cortex®-A and Cortex-R processors. For information relative to Cortex-M, please refer to our DSP for Cortex-M page.

Key applications

The floating-point data type is essential for a wide range of digital signal processing (DSP) applications. Many applications inherently benefit from the dynamic range and precision of floating-point to deal with large data sets or data sets with unpredictable range. Then it makes floating-point usage particularly suitable when computational accuracy is a critical requirement.

Examples of such applications are:

  • Automotive control applications
    • Powertrain
    • ABS, Traction control & active suspension
  • 3D Graphics
    • Digital consumer products
    • Set-top boxes and games consoles
  • Imaging
    • Laser printers, still digital cameras, and digital video cameras
  • Industrial control systems
    • Motion controls

Related tools

ARM DS-5 Development Studio provides an end-to-end suite of tools for C/C++ software development for ARM-based platforms. DS-5 fully supports ARM floating-point architecture for programming and debugging.