Swiss Firm Claims Boost In Android App Performance

Precision writes to inform us about the Swiss firm Myriad, which claims a 3x boost in Android app performance and longer battery life with a new virtual machine. Myriad says that its technology is 100% compatible with existing Android apps. "The tool is a replacement for the Dalvik virtual machine, which ships as part of the Android platform, and retains full compatibility with existing software. Dalvik Turbo also supports a range of processors including those based on ARM, Intel Atom, and MIPS Architectures."

Comments

Just in Time Compiling

[AntiRush]

I imagine a big part of the speed increase comes from JIT - something that the current Dalvik implementation on Android doesn't do. There is, however, an experimental JIT branch. It would be nice to see how Myriad's stacks up to it. This test claims about a 3x increase in speed by enabling the existing JIT features.

Re:Java vs Objective C - is iPhone always faster?

[WaywardGeek]

Several things come to mind. First, my Nexus One, like the iPhone, burns about 85% of it's power on the display. If it weren't for the display, it could play music and keep the receiver active, and probably do a few more things and have the battery last for days. So, we're really only talking about the last 15%. Second, many applications run in compiled C, like webkit, the network stack, the map application, speech synthesis, 3D rendering, etc. These apps are going to probably be the similar on both phones in terms of efficiency. So, in Java, a lot of what we're really talking about is the code that pops up pretty windows. It's hard for me to imagine that takes much power.

I expect big advances in the future. Low power displays will be huge. After that, maybe we should revisit the JVM.