The compiler provides many features for managing floating-point arithmetic both in hardware and in software. For example, you can specify software or hardware support for floating-point, particular hardware architectures, and the level of conformance to IEEE floating-point standards.

The selection of floating-point options determines various trade-offs between floating-point performance, system cost, and system flexibility. To obtain the best trade-off between performance, cost, and flexibility, you have to make sensible choices in your selection of floating-point options.

The ARM processor core does not contain floating-point hardware so floating-point arithmetic must be supported separately, either:

Code that uses hardware support for floating-point arithmetic is more compact and offers better performance than code that performs floating-point arithmetic in software. However, hardware support for floating-point arithmetic requires a VFP coprocessor.