

Nexus One running Android Froyo 2.2 is 450% faster than Eclair 2.1 - archon810
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/

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technomancy
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.

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archon810
Thank you for clarifications, everyone (including Cyanogen himself). I've
updated the article to reflect these.

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mehta
Cached link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: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/&hl=en&strip=1)

Scroll to the middle of the page for article.

~~~
archon810
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.

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jbellis
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?

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Daishiman
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.

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nimrody
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).

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wgren
That is basically what JIT is. Why reinvent the wheel when they can use the
resources that has been poured into JVM research?

~~~
jbellis
Except they can't, really. Dalvik is completely unrelated to Hotspot or any
other JVM out there. (Remember that Android doesn't run Java class files
natively, it's first compiled into dex.)

~~~
wgren
Right you are jbellis. Had forgotten that Dalvik isn't just a small JVM but a
completely different architecture (register based, etc).

But anyway, what nimrody suggested is what they are doing - using platform
neutral Dalvik bytecode and then transition to native through JIT.

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ericz
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.

~~~
ubernostrum
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.

~~~
lenni
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.

~~~
apgwoz
From what I've heard, the 2.1 update for Hero is not HTC's fault, but
Sprint's.

That said, HTC cranks out more Android phones than god, so I can imagine
they'd potentially drop the ball on supporting old phones to get new ones to
market, if it is indeed them with the holdup.

BTW, May 21st is the latest "release day" now.

~~~
lenni
I'm on T-Mobile Germany; is T-Mobile also dragging its heels?

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megablast
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.

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justinph
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
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
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.

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buster
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_alien
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.

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leecho0
I'm curious, how much faster would it run if these tests were written in
native code?

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pkulak
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.

~~~
s3graham
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.

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

Call me intrigued!

