Thumb-2 technology is available in the ARMv6T2 and later architectures. Thumb-2 is a major enhancement to the 16-bit Thumb instruction set. It adds 32-bit instructions that can be freely intermixed with 16-bit instructions in a program. The additional 32-bit instructions enable Thumb-2 to cover the functionality of the ARM instruction set. The 32-bit instructions enable Thumb-2 to combine the code density of earlier versions of Thumb, with performance of the ARM instruction set.

The most important difference between the Thumb-2 instruction set and the ARM instruction set is that most 32-bit Thumb instructions are unconditional, whereas most ARM instructions can be conditional. Thumb-2 introduces a conditional execution instruction, IT, that is a logical if-then-else operation that you can apply to subsequent instructions to make them conditional.

For more information on the instruction set, see the ARM Architecture Reference Manual and the Technical Reference Manual for your processor.