Android gets turbo charged
About a week and a half ago, Myriad Group announced an updated version of the Dalvik VM for Android, appropriately called the Dalvik Turbo VM. Running the Dalvik Turbo VM, Android devices can experience a 2x – 3x performance boost in their applications.
What does this mean for Android users?
With any Android device, it’s pretty apparent that they are performing below what one would expect from their hardware specs. This is because Android was designed to run on a wide range of devices, including devices with limited resources and processing power.
If your phone were to be updated with the new Dalvik Turbo VM, you wouldn’t experience nearly as much lag, applications would open faster and perform better, and you would actually see improved battery life (all things that as an Android user I would LOVE to see.)
How does it work?
The Dalvik VM is a virtual machine that runs in the background on all Android devices. It acts like a middleman between the applications and the OS itself. One of the things that makes Android so attractive to developers is that it’s apps are written in Java, the Dalvik VM then takes the Java code and converts it on the fly into code that Android can use. The Dalvik Turbo VM is an enhanced version of the original VM that makes the conversion process a whole lot speedier. The new Turbo VM is said to be 100% compatible with Google’s stock VM so any existing apps would be able to see the benefits from this as well.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJpQQZdYPM]
A demo of the Dalvik Turbo VM vs Dalvik VM on a pair of Android Dev Phone 2′s.
How can I get it?!
Sadly that’s not such an easy thing to answer. While Myriad hasn’t given an official answer, it is believed that the devices that would most benefit from the new Dalvik Turbo VM (T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch 3G) won’t be seeing it and it will only be included on new retail devices (which we should see before the end of the year.) That said, many of the Android faithful (myself included) are hoping to see the new VM show up in the popular Cyanogenmod Android ROM amongst others in the near future.
If you’d like to see some more info on the Dalvik Turbo VM, check these links for some impressions and other demo videos:
