The ARM floating-point environment is an implementation of the IEEE 754-1985 standard for binary floating-point arithmetic.

An ARM system might have:

If you compile for a system with a hardware VFP coprocessor, the ARM compiler makes use of it. If you compile for a system without a coprocessor, the compiler implements the computations in software. For example, the compiler option --fpu=vfp selects a hardware VFP coprocessor and the option --fpu=softvfp specifies that arithmetic operations are to be performed in software, without the use of any coprocessor instructions.