In the last decades embedded systems have been challenged with more and more application variety, each time more constrained. This implies an ever growing need for performances and energy efficiency in arithmetic units. This work studies solutions ranging from hardware to software to improve arithmetic support in embedded systems. Some of these solutions were integrated in Kalray's MPPA processor.The first part of this work focuses on floating-Point arithmetic support in the MPPA. It starts with the design of a floating-Point unit (FPU) based on the classical FMA (Fused Multiply-Add) operator. The improvements we suggest, implement and evaluate include a mixed precision FMA, a 3-Operand add and a 2D scalar product, each time with a single r...