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Linaro Tweaks Speed Up Android, By Up To 100 Percent
Argon writes with an excerpt from Liliputing of interest to Android users: "'The folks behind the Linaro open source software project have put a little time into tweaking Google Android to use the gcc 4.7 toolchain. The result is a version of Android that can perform many tasks between 30 and 100 percent faster than the version of Android Google 4.0 Google currently offers through the AOSP (Android Open Source Project).' Adds Argon: "Note that there are CPU optimizations only since they have only access to binary blobs for GPU code."
that's where the guys with long hair are!
So we're building a faster more powerful android now? I wonder if the end result will be an energy draining old man, or a cocky teenager who's destined to become part of a biological super weapon.
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After digging through the TFA I found Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430). Which after digging in the comments leads to www.linaro.org/
/.
But the meat of the whole report is contained in this comment from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer which contains some better stats and also links to the toolchains and source code.
After this much manual digging I've realized that I'm getting to jaded for
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
... and the results are quite amazing with Android Linaro achieving about 60 fps in all 0xBenchmark tests (OpenGL Cube, OpenGL Blending, OpenGL Fog and Flying Teapot) whereas Android stock achieving 30 fps. They selected a benchmark tool that is mainly CPU bound, as they cannot optimize the GPU code since they can only access binary blobs.
Also as you said yourself, it's a summary if you want the meat and potatoes of the data described just click on the damn thing instead of bitching.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
it means the battery lasts longer - if you can twice the work in the same time, that means the same amount of work takes half the time - so you've cut your CPU usage by half.
Of course, this doesn't mean your battery life doubles as most of the battery goes towards running the screen, but you should get a small boost which you''ll see when running CPU-intensive tasks, like games.
The cynic in me says that even if it is a simple patch and recompile for existing android devices, we will never see it from any OEMs--it takes away some of the reason to buy the latest shiny.
Here's hoping for the community android rebuilds...
You're confusing this with something else. 100% faster means twice as fast. As in take the original speed, and add to it 100% of the original speed (e.g. 30 + (30 * 1.0)).
No, you're confusing speed (a calculated value) with time required for completion (the easily-measured value) - they are inversely related to each other. The article claims 100% faster, not 100% less time required. In car terms: a car going 200mph is 100% faster than one going 100mph, and 300% faster than one going 50mph. The relevant equation is
(percentage change) = (measured quantity - reference quantity) / (reference quantity)
or alternately
(percentage change) = (measured quantity) / (reference quantity) - 1
which should make makes it obvious that the possible value range is [-100%, infinity)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, if only they used a modern language like .net then we could have pro-programmers working on it. Too bad no one has come out with a phone like that. I bet it would sell great if promoted by someone with a large desktop install base.
That's not guaranteed at all. The power consumption of a CPU is a function of a huge variety of things. It's possible that while the run time is shorter, the power draw is higher--possibly more than proportionally higher.
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
It's possible that while the run time is shorter, the power draw is higher--possibly more than proportionally higher.
Possible, but very unlikely. Current processors are quite bad at running at "half power", i.e. if not all function units are running full speed they still waste power. The scheduling strategy "hurry up and wait" still tends to beat other strategies, because modern CPU's are so very good at saving power when idling. You would have to waste an enormous amount of power during the "hurry up" part of the strategy to not win in the end during the "wait" phase.
In a few years this may change, as systems get better at handling partial load. If you could e.g. only keep the memory chips which are used by the current task awake, that would help quite a bit. Today it is AFAIK either all memory chips awake at once or all of them in power save mode. Software support would be fun, as the OS would have to try to keep the working set on as few memory chips as possible.
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