ARM NEON is an advanced Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture extension for the Arm Cortex-A and Arm Cortex-R series of processors. It is an evolution of ARM SIMD instructions and is billed as a "media engine" within the ARM core.
NEON is the ARMv8 version of SIMD, where a single operation performs the same operation on multiple data elements in parallel.
NEON technology provides a set of instructions that can be used to accelerate multimedia and signal processing applications, such as:
- image
- video processing
- audio encoding/decoding
- speech recognition
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) provides built-in intrinsics for the ARM Advanced SIMD extension, which are available when the -mfpu=neon switch is used.