Froyo, Google’s next-gen Android OS, was recently tested on a Nexus One smartphone and racked up an impressive 450% speed increase over version 2.1.
According to Artem Russakovskii of Android Police, Nexus One performance was measured using Android Linpack, a utility specifically designed to test the performance of Dalvik VM – the “brains” of the operating system.
“These results are so impressive, most likely due to the introduction of the long awaited JIT compilation into the kernel,” wrote Russakovskii.
“[Now], the Nexus One running Android 2.1 gets about 6.5-7 MFLOPS, [while] my HTC Hero averages a measly score of about 2 MFLOPS. So how does the Nexus One with Froyo do? A whopping 37.5 MFLOPS.”
Russakovskii speculated that Google had made the Android 2.2 environment “more efficient” to handle the CPU-hungry demands of Flash.
“Adobe wasn’t giving Apple what they needed, and Apple wasn’t giving Adobe, well, anything,” mused Russakovskii.
“But Google thought of the problem outside the box, like the ingenious engineers to the core that they are and made Android so much faster than it could finally run full Flash without a hitch.”
