Linaro Tweaks Speed Up Android, By Up To 100 Percent 97
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."
Better link (Score:5, Informative)
After digging through the TFA I found Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430) [cnx-software.com]. Which after digging in the comments leads to www.linaro.org/ [linaro.org]
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But the meat of the whole report is contained in this comment from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer [cnx-software.com] 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
Re:battery life (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:100% faster, uhm no (Score:4, Informative)
Re:100% faster, uhm no (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Rebuilds for existing devices? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:battery life (Score:5, Informative)
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.