Our good friends over at AndroidPolice have their hands “all up in the ‘Froyo’”, snagging a tasty build of Android 2.2 for their Nexus one. Of all of the rumored features of the upcoming Android 2.2 release (Adobe Flash, Apps2SD, 3D improvements etc.), the “Fuzz” is calling out Froyo as an absolute speed demon based on test results performed on their frozen Nexus treat with benchmarking tool Linpack.
Linpack is heavily-used testing suite to benchmark the performance of super computers, personal computers, and is now one of the gold-standard apps for benchmarking your Android phone. Users upload their results to the online database to compare and keep score. We’ll save you the myriad of calculations and formulas (math geeks can find those here), and get straight to the juice.
Linpack scores are measured in MFLOPS (Millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second), and to give you some baseline comparison numbers:
The Nexus One running Android 2.1 gets about 6.5-7 MFLOPS.
The Fuzz ran a test on their HTC Hero, and found it achieved a score of about 2 MFLOPS
Then they ran a Linpack benchmark on the Nexus One running Android 2.2, and achieved a staggering 37.593 MFLOPS!
That’s an insane jump in performance, and can largely be attributed to the new JIT compiler that will come in Android 2.2. The JIT (Just in Time) compiler will now be a part of the Davlik VM, the virtual machine in Android that executes code and turns Java code into all of those pretty apps you’ve come to love. In short, it’s the heart of Android and without it, we’d be app-less. The new JIT compiler has been in testing by for quite some time, and the performance boost has been said to be 2x-3x fold in some cases.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Nexus One running Froyo is now easily at the top of Linpack scores for Android devices:
Notice the hits of “FROYO” in the “Notes” section on the right? The only recorded tests faster are those running Android inside virtual machines on a PC, and on a Asus EEE netbook. I see you though Moto DROID.
OK OK, enough technical jargon, you really just want to know what all of this means to you, the user, right? Well, it means that Android performance is about to hit a whole new level, specifically on the application side of things. Yes the operating system itself should be faster (which, if you have a newer Android phone seems crazy in and of itself), but more importantly it means that applications will be faster, a lot faster. Using the new JIT compiler will enable Android to execute an application’s code that much quicker, which translates to the app performing that much faster in user-land. Resource-intensive apps and games will greatly benefit from the new compiler, and it will allow developers to really push the boundaries; to create games and applications that perform to the likes of which we’ve never seen. And who like the sound of that? I thought so.
With full Flash 10.1 support, Apps2SD, improved 3D capabilities, SPEED, fixing the Nexus One’s touchscreen issues, a new Linux kernel that will address all of the memory in newer devices (N1, Incredible), and maybe most importantly, solving the fragmentation problem, Android 2.2 is shaping up to be a HUGE update. When Google announces it at Google I/O next week it’s going to make headlines everywhere, and we’ll be here bringing you the news in all it’s frozen yogurty-goodness.
Read: Android Police
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