Most of current computers include multimedia features. In this paper, we use these extensions to compute elementary functions based on polynomial approximations. Hence, we present several alternatives taking advantage of the new attributes on multimedia processors, such as VLIW and SIMD architectures. Our algorithms support the polynomial evaluation in two different ways: the first one is only based in addition/shift operations; while the second uses MAC instructions. Both approximations are analyzed and tailored to subword parallelism units of the new processors. Potential instruction-level and machine-level parallelism are fully exploited through concurrent use of all functional units. A combined approximation using MAC units and addition and shifts is also presented as a third approximation. Two new instructions are also presented here to improve the execution of some of our algorithms.