Depending on the implementation used by the silicon manufacturer, the NVIC can support up to 240 external interrupts with up to 256 different priority levels that can be dynamically reprioritized. It supports both level and pulse interrupt sources. The processor state is automatically saved by hardware on interrupt entry and is restored on interrupt exit. The NVIC also supports tail-chaining of interrupts.

The use of an NVIC in the Cortex-M3 means that the vector table for a Cortex-M3 is very different to previous ARM cores. The Cortex-M3 vector table contains the address of the exception handlers and ISR, not instructions as most other ARM cores do. The initial stack pointer and the address of the reset handler must be located at 0x0 and 0x4 respectively. These values are then loaded into the appropriate CPU registers at reset.