Nexus One running Android Froyo 2.2 is 450% faster than Eclair 2.1

http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/05/11/exclusive-androidpolice-coms-nexus-one-is-running-android-2-2-froyo-how-fast-is-it-compared-to-2-1-oh-only-about-450-faster/

by archon810 • 16 years ago

75 38 16 years ago

androidpolice.com

drivebyacct• 16 years ago

JIT, Flash, and defragmentation all in one release!?

Call me intrigued!

megablast• 16 years ago

This is great, but they only ran one test on the device, Linpack. Just keep this in mind, the phone will not be 4.5x faster, with the new OS.

jbellis2• 16 years ago

I understand why Google would want to use Java in their app platform. But if they didn't have the resources to get JIT working before now, wouldn't gcj (or hell, write your own java-to-machine-code compiler, clearly Google isn't scared of writing compilers) have been better than using a non-JITed VM?

Daishiman• 16 years ago

The point of using a VM was to abstract away from specific processor targets, since embedded processors run from ARM to PowerPC, MIPS, x86, and others (and multiple variants of each processor, support additional instruction sets). This allows OEMs to produce an x86 port of stuff while keeping 95% of all apps which don't need native compilation.

nimrody• 16 years ago

Well, you could always ship software in platform neutral code and make the final transition to native code when they are installed (either with something like gcj or use some intermediate representation like LLVM does).

s3graham2• 16 years ago

It's not quite that obvious. Compared to desktop/server where almost any jit is a win, there's substantial pressure on memory usage and battery life. An interpreter can do better on whole-system performance for both of those, without special care for when to run the jit, and how it's implemented.

I'm looking forward to seeing Bill Buzbee's talk on the JIT at I/O (of the most excellent http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ incidentally! :)

ergo982• 16 years ago

>But if they didn't have the resources to get JIT working before now, wouldn't gcj (or hell, write your own java-to-machine-code compiler, clearly Google isn't scared of writing compilers) have been better than using a non-JITed VM?

The Dalvik VM uses its own bytecode and all, so they would have to heavily modify anything existing.

Ultimately Android has been a work in progress. JIT is something that everyone has been asking for since day one, but there just aren't enough resources -- Apple is a $220 billion dollar company that is significantly hinged on the iPhone OS. The Android project, while relied upon by a lot of companies, is largely the work of Google that sees little to no revenue from it (their primary motivation, purportedly, was simply to ensure that there were options in the market).

cpr• 16 years ago

Clarification: their primary motivation is so that they could ensure that at least some part of the mobile market could run their ads, they realizing that mobile is the future, and that ads are currently their only real source of income.

mehta• 16 years ago

Cached link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Scroll to the middle of the page for article.

archon8102• 16 years ago

The servers were indeed melting after engadget, gizmodo, HN, and reddit all ganged up on us simultaneously but the fires have been put out and we're now happily serving anyone interested.

For the curious ones, when the reqs/s number reached about 220 and the server melted, I had to figure out a new solution.

No problem, as I have selected Linode to be our VPS provider and was able to upgrade from a 360MB RAM Linode to a 1080MB one in about 15 minutes of downtime. Some apache tweaking was needed, of course, but now we're pushing all the traffic that is required with quite a bit of room to grow.

Thanks for all the upvotes.

justinph• 16 years ago

I'd like to see some real world usage rather than synthetic and (mostly) meaningless benchmarks. That said, this sounds awesome. Maybe the final bump that'll push me to ditch my 2G iPhone.

malkia• 16 years ago

But then again a lot of the game code is similar pretty much to such benchmarking code - for example skinning, physics, collision detection, FFT.

CitizenKane• 16 years ago

While that's true, a small piece of code can likely be JITed once and then will essentially become cached. I'm guessing that real world applications will have more overhead from JITing thus the performance likely won't be quite as good. Still, even if performance increased by 2x - 3.5x or so that would be a huge win.

newhouseb• 16 years ago

Agreed, Linpack on ARM sounds ridiculous since ARM by definition doesn't have a true FPU (ignoring VFP and NEON).

Then again, maybe it means more on ARM because it's an indication of low level software optimizations rather than actual hardware, and might be more relevant for applications that don't actually require floating point math.

technomancy• 16 years ago

The author is rather confused about what's going on here.

> Things are starting to finally come together. Flash and huge performance gains, all in the same release. Flash is CPU hungry, so Android makes everything about the environment more efficient.

Adding JIT improves the speed of the Dalvik VM. But unless Adobe threw away their existing Flash codebase for the Android port, Flash is going to run as native code on the device, which is entirely outside the Dalvik VM. So these speed improvements will not affect Flash performance at all.

archon8102• 16 years ago

Thank you for clarifications, everyone (including Cyanogen himself). I've updated the article to reflect these.

not_an_alien2• 16 years ago

Exactly. Same for the system as a whole.

It should be a nice boost for Apps/games available in the market though. Weird that they didn't have JIT until now.

zwetan• 16 years ago

Flash is certainly running as native code on the device as they do CPU and GPU optimization

see http://tv.adobe.com/watch/flash-camp-san-francisco/flash-pla... for more details

also because Google is part of the Open Screen Project http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/current_partners.h...

those same CPU and GPU optimization could benefit Android itself (not only Flash)

those partners are about being open to each others, exactly the opposite of you know who ;)

buster• 16 years ago

Wow.. i knew that many people cried for JIT, but now seeing numbers.. i hope the update will be released soon! Hopefully at Google I/O?

not_an_alien2• 16 years ago

They said they'll release Flash at Google I/O, and they already got their Froyo cast for the Google offices, so... yeah, I'm leaning on the 'yes' side for Android 2.2 available at Google I/O.

ericz• 16 years ago

The improved feature set and performance of 2.2 is great and all but let's not forget Android's real problem: most of the Android handsets on the market won't see 2.2 until way after release. The segmentation of the operating system among different devices really inhibits much of its potential.

pyre• 16 years ago

True, but there are plenty of people yet to get an Android phone. These people will probably end up with a newer model that has all of these bells and whistles. I'm not really sure that Android has reached a 'critical mass' yet. Sure it's starting to out-pace the iPhone, but it still has huge potential for growth in the market. That these improvements are coming now, means that it will only help Android to grow (as the new handsets will come with v2.2 and all of the improvements).

That said, it would be nice if the carrier-branded Android handsets bothered to update more regularly...

joubert2• 16 years ago

Who pushes updates? The carrier, handset maker, or Google? Or do hey all have to agree?

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

I still can't help feeling that the initial underpowered Android devices also did a lot of damage; I read so many reports of slow/jerky/unresponsive UI, and now have heard complaints from friends who bought recent (up to and including the HTC Incredible) Android phones about basic stuff like the phone app having performance issues, that the whole brand's a bit tainted at this point.

What Android needs, more than anything else, is a year or so of rock-solid performance from the popular devices, or else that bad reputation's really going to stick.

lenni2• 16 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. I bought the HTC Hero 6 months ago and it is really, really laggy at times. I wish I'd bought an iPhone. To insult to insury, HTC has been delaying updating it to 2.1 for months now, all whilst claiming that the update is 'ready in February/March/April/...'.

Yes, Apple behaves like a paranoid control freak, but they get stuff done.

pkulak• 16 years ago

JIT is nice, but it's not going to really matter. Anything that needs performance is already natively compiled. So, this should make your tip calculator scream! It may mean that from now on devs can use Java where they had to use the native API before.

s3graham2• 16 years ago

That's not true. Much of the UI toolkit is in Java and normal interaction frame rate suffers without a lot of care and fiddly caching tricks.

leecho0• 16 years ago

I'm curious, how much faster would it run if these tests were written in native code?

Nexus One running Android Froyo 2.2 is 450% faster than Eclair 2.1

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