Android 2.2 Demonstrates Significant Investment in Support of the ARM Architecture

May 27, 2010

What: In conjunction with their annual Google I/O event, Google has announced the next release of the Android 2.2 platform. This latest release includes a large number of significant enhancements that further exploit the underlying ARM® architecture to improve performance and functionality. The latest release includes Google’s new Dalvik Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler that generates native Thumb ®-2 code. The new ARM targeted JIT technology coupled with the code density advantages of the Thumb-2 instruction set provides a significant performance boost to the Dalvik Java application framework, resulting in improved application performance of up to two to five times and therefore even greater battery life.

The Android 2.2 release also brings enhanced support for native development on ARM via the new NDK 3.0 which includes native code debug and support for ARMv7 architecture VFP operations and the NEON™ SIMD architecture, enabling data processing parallelization to accelerate various functions like multi-media playback and graphics rendering. The ARM architecture-based NDK allows developers to produce performance intensive applications, such as 3D gaming and VoIP clients, some of which were demonstrated on ARM Powered Android phones at Google I/O.

Other enhancements include, but are not limited to, improved JavaScript performance and web page rendering speeds. Google demonstrated that V8 delivered a JavaScript speedup of up to two to three times that of the previous Android release. ARM is an active engineering contributor to the Google V8 project to optimize the performance of this core web technology.

When: All of these improvements for the ARM architecture, will be available immediately from the Android open source project at the time of the Android 2.2 release.

Where: The latest open source release can be downloaded directly from Google at http://source.android.com/

About ARM

ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. ARM’s comprehensive product offering includes 32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics processors, video engines, enabling software, cell libraries, embedded memories, high-speed connectivity products, peripherals and development tools. Combined with comprehensive design services, training, support and maintenance, and the company’s broad Partner community, they provide a total system solution that offers a fast, reliable path to market for leading electronics companies.

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