Sunday, 9 July 2017

c - STM32F4 - Floating point unit ( FPU )



I would like to know, what is the purpose of the special FPU unit, that is advertised with STM32F4 microcontrollers ?


To quote this website :



" The Cortex-M4 core features a Floating point unit (FPU) single precision which supports all ARM single-precision data-processing instructions and data types. "



What would be the difference, if this unit was not present in the architecture ? Does this mean I need to use some special libraries / functions when doing arithmetics with floating point variables ? Thank you.



Answer



Yes, if you don't have a hardware floating-point unit then floating-point operations must be performed using library functions. That's what is done with typical Cortex-M3 processors that do not have hardware floating-point support, and the execution time for these operations goes up significantly.


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