Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430)

The team at Linaro has done an amazing job at optimizing Android 4.0 for ARM and Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Android Engineer at Linaro among other things, has put all those optimizations together to showcase a demo at Linaro Connect Q2.2012 in Hong Kong with 2 pandaboards:

  • One running Stock Android 4.0.4, the one released by Google (AOSP)
  • One running Linaro Android 4.0.4

Both hardware, android version and benchmark software (oxBench) are the same, and the results are quite amazing with Android Linaro achieving about 60 fps in all 0xBenchmark tests (OpenGL Cube, OpenGL Blending, OpenGL Fog and Flying Teapot) whereas Android stock achieving 30 fps. They selected a benchmark tool that is mainly CPU bound, as they cannot optimize the GPU code since they can only access binary blobs.

Apparently, most of the improvements were possible thanks to toolchain and code optimization (to be able to build) such as using gcc 4.7 and building Android ICS without -fno-strict-aliasing and with -O3 compiler flag (first released in Linaro 12.01). So that means for this particular benchmark, they achieved to double Android performance just by “tweaking” the software. [Important update: A detailed analysis shows the benchmark is somewhat flawed, and it’s a VSync thing that makes Android appears to be twice as fast. In reality the improvements are in the 20 to 30% range, which is still very good with just software optimizations. Bero also notes that 100% speed improvement may still happen in real apps such as 3D games that may also wait for VSync to refresh the screen].

I know you don’t believe me… So have a look at the video below. 🙂 (Source: Charbax)

[Update: If you want to try it yourself and access the toolchain and source, please see Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (Bero) comment below with all the information you need.]

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30 Replies to “Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430)”

  1. So, if this is true and Bero publicizes what he has done, can the CyanogenMod people start using the method and make the CM on my phone twice as fast?

    If it is true, I guess Google will be interested too in his method and in hiring Bero?

    I say “if this is true”, because “twice as fast” is quite a claim.

  2. @ Sander

    You can take a look at the video, and even download the OS images we’ve used to do the benchmark.
    Obviously saying we’ve made it “twice as fast” is a bit of an oversimplification.

    This particular benchmark (the 3D benchmark included in 0xbench) runs twice as fast on this particular hardware. Other benchmarks (e.g. Sunspider) are “merely” 30% faster, some others are only slightly faster (e.g. GLMark2 – as it’s mostly GPU bound), and it would be possible to craft a benchmark showing that our build is 10 times faster (write a benchmark that uses strcpy, memset and friends heavily, which I’ve actually done, not to show off but to test if our changes are as beneficial as we’re hoping).

    CM people can obviously pick up what we’ve done – so can Google, we’ll be submitting the changes to AOSP shortly.

    The Linaro toolchain has been out in the open forever, Linux binaries are here, sources are here.

    Linaro’s Android builds (that have all the changes required to make use of the Linaro toolchain efficiently) have been around forever, here.

    The kernel source we’re using is available here.

    The only thing we did for this demo that isn’t in the open yet is a rewrite of the string routines in Bionic, based on Linaro’s Cortex Strings library.

    This will be added to our builds shortly, the only reason it isn’t there is that I had to do a bit of sloppy coding in order to get things done for the demo (merging the patchset as it is right now would give Cortex A9 all the improvements shown in the demo, but it would leave ARMv5 users with an unbootable build — but we wanted to show something at the end of the Linaro Connect event). The patchset will go in as soon as I’ve cleaned it up a bit more.

    Some press coverage puts me a bit too much at the center of things – it’s not like I single-handedly made things twice as fast. This is the work of Linaro as a whole, I’m just the one who put the various bits and pieces together, merging them all into one usable build. Google would be much better off working closer with Linaro than attempting to hire me or anyone of the others involved off.

  3. Bero and his teams certainly deserve an epic thumbs up for this work! Thank you kind sirs for fighting the good fight and making our phones faster. Hope who needs to see/hear this, will.

  4. Will this optimisation be applicable to only TI OPMAP porocessors or any ARm device, I mean Qualcomm Snapdragon S2/S3/S4?

  5. @ Sukumar
    Yes,, these optimizations are for Cortex A processors (ARMv7 architecture), so they should also work for other ARMv7 processors, although the benchmark results might differ between SoC.

  6. @ Sander

    Yes, that’s a certainty. The CM team can make the necessary improvements in their current CM9 versions even before Google decides to update it (that is, if they choose to optimize their version with this one)

  7. @ Marco
    Tegra 2 is a dual cortex A9, so it’s technically possible. LG won’t provide a firmware update, but you should be able to install CM9 as I’m pretty sure those optimizations will end up in CyanogenMod.

  8. @ asfdd
    It’s just that AOSP team is focusing on other parts. Linaro has several teams including a team dedicated to the ARM toolchain and an ARM Android team. The no-strict aliasing “bug” had been filled since last year (August last year), and since then the guys at Linaro have brought some improvements. I’m pretty sure the AOSP team was aware of this work, and knew they did not need to work on it themselves.

  9. even after clicking “mobile off” at bottom of the page, it still do not switch to destop site.
    I’m on dell streak official android 2.2.2 , tried all available browser’s.

    Pls fix this issue.

    Thanks & Regards

    * I’ve never had this problem with charbax’s blog.

  10. @ max
    I can also see the issue on my Android Tablet. It works as a logged-in user, but fails with normal visitors. This must be a caching issue. I’ll try to find time to have a look at it this week.

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