NEON technology (external link) is
a 64/128-bit hybrid SIMD architecture developed by ARM to accelerate the
performance of multimedia and signal processing applications
[...].
The NEON architecture provides at least 3x the performance of
ARMv5 and 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD on a range of media and DSP
applications.
Only the newest tools currently target v7. e.g. CodeSourcery’s GCC ARM toolchain (external link).