The ARM compilation tools provide intrinsics to generate NEON code for all Cortex-A series processors in both ARM and Thumb state. The NEON intrinsics are defined in the header file arm_neon.h. The header file defines both the intrinsics and a set of vector types.

There is no support for NEON intrinsics for architectures before ARMv7. When building for earlier architectures, or for ARMv7 architecture profiles that do not include NEON, the compiler treats NEON intrinsics as ordinary function calls. This results in an error at link time.