title: ARM Cortex-A8: Whats the difference between VFP and NEON
body: <p>In ARM Cortex-A8 processor, I understand what NEON is, it is an SIMD co-processor.</p>
  
  <p>But is VFP(Vector Floating Point) unit, which is also a co-processor, works as a SIMD processor? If so which one is better to use?</p>
  
  <p>I read few links such as -</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p><a href="http://wanderingcoder.net/2010/06/02/intro-neon/">Link1</a></p></li>
  <li><p><a href="http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=52504">Link2</a>.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>But not really very clear what they mean. They say that VFP was never intended to be used for SIMD but on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#VFP">Wiki</a> I read the following - "<em>The VFP architecture also supports execution of short vector instructions but these operate on each vector element sequentially and thus do not offer the performance of true SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) parallelism.</em>"</p>
  
  <p>It so not so clear what to believe, can anyone elaborate more on this topic?</p>