Limitations on hardware handling of
floating-point arithmetic
ARM Vector Floating-Point (VFP) coprocessors
are optimized to process well-defined floating-point code in hardware.
Arithmetic operations that occur too rarely, or that are too complex,
are not handled in hardware. Instead, processing of these cases
must be handled in software. This approach minimizes the amount
of coprocessor hardware required and reduces costs.
Code provided to handle cases the VFP hardware is unable to
process is known as VFP support code. When the VFP hardware is unable
to deal with a situation directly, it bounces the case to VFP support
code for more processing. For example, VFP support code might be
called to process any of the following:
floating-point
operations involving NaNs
floating-point operations involving denormals.
floating-point overflow
floating-point underflow
inexact results
division-by-zero errors
invalid operations.
When support code is in place, the VFP supports a fully IEEE
754-compliant floating-point model.
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