The floating point capabilities of the ARM VFP offer increased performance for floating point arithmetic used in automotive powertrain and body control applications, imaging applications such as scaling, transforms and font generation in printing, 3D transforms, FFT and filtering in graphics. The next generation of consumer products such as Internet appliances, set-top boxes, and home gateways, can directly benefit from the ARM VFP.
VFP Applications
- Automotive control applications
- Powertrain
- ABS, Traction control & active suspension
- 3D Graphics
- Digital consumer products
- Set-top boxes, games consoles
- Imaging
- Laser printers, still digital cameras, digital video cameras
- Industrial control systems
- Motion controls
Many real-time control applications in the industrial and automotive fields benefit from the dynamic range and precision of floating-point offered by the ARM VFP. Automotive powertrain, anti-lock braking, traction control, and active suspension systems are all mission-critical applications where precision and predictability are essential requirements.
VFP architecture versions
Before the ARMv7 architecture, VFP stood for Vector Floating-point Architecture, used for vector operations.
Provision of hardware floating point is essential for many applications, and can be used as part of a System on Chip (SoC) design flow using high-level design tools (eg MatLab, MATRIXx and LabVIEW) to directly model the system and derive the application code. Using hardware floating point combined with the NEON™ multimedia processing capability, performance of imaging applications such as scaling, 2D and 3D transforms, font generation, and digital filters can be increased.
There have been three main versions of VFP to date:
- VFPv1 is obsolete. Details are available on request from ARM.
- VFPv2 is an optional extension to the ARM instruction set in the ARMv5TE, ARMv5TEJ and ARMv6 architectures.
- VFPv3 is an optional extension to the ARM, Thumb® and ThumbEE instruction sets in the ARMv7-A and ARMv7-R profiles. VFPv3 implementation is with either thirty-two or sixteen double word registers. The terms VFPv3-D32 and VFPv3-D16 distinguish between these two implementation options. Extending VFPv3 uses the half-precision extensions that provide conversion functions in both directions between half-precision floating-point and single-precision floating-point.
