Google has reaffirmed its belief in the ARM processor architecture for smartphone and mobile applications with the next release of the Android 2.2 platform.
The latest release of the mobile operating system (OS) includes Google’s new Dalvik Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler that generates native Thumb-2 code.
Thumb-2 is the 32-bit instruction set of the Cortex-A8 processor.
“The 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,” said Google.
The also supports 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.
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 Android smartphones based on the Cortex-A8 processor at the Google I/O event in the US.
There is also 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.