Swiss Firm Claims Boost In Android App Performance 132
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."
Re:Another JVM (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a comment [androidcommunity.com] on one of the Android sites saying that a similar performance improvement was already in the Android tree but was too alpha-y to make it to any production builds.
Kuchichaestli (Score:3, Interesting)
Nur i de Schwiiz!
Hopp Schwiiz!
Re:Behold (Score:1, Interesting)
The question is... is Google going to accept the new VM? Or is this going to be a fork of the original code?
Just in Time Compiling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Java vs Objective C - is iPhone always faster? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Behold (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of reasons a 3X speed improvement could be had. For example, optimizing memory layout for cache performace could do it. If one system had a heap that randomly scatters objects through memory, and the other packs like-fields of objects together in dense arrays, inner loop cache performace can be improved greatly. I saw a factor of 17X in one case. It's amazing to me how few programmers today bother getting down to this all-important performance bottleneck.
Java hardware acceleration was discarded (Score:3, Interesting)
Java hardware acceleration was discarded by the Android platform.
Imagine if someone were to translate Dalvik into a bytecode that is compatible with the inbuilt Java acceleration of most mobile-market processors.
The fact that Android uses Dalvik instead of Java throws away an important hardware-based performance boost of native Java acceleration.