BenchmarkPi app made me proud!

So, I knew that the tiny simple app named BenchmarkPi I developed for android to benchmark a android’s phone processor was used by various websites reviewing and comparing android devices.

But today I got really excited.

I was watching some videos of the Google’s IO 2010, when I came to the “Google I/O 2010 – A JIT Compiler for Android’s Dalvik VM“. It was a very interesting presentation about the new JIT for Android explaining the why and the how but at a certain point, around 24:24 I saw a screen that made me pop up from my seat and start smiling like crazy.

As you can see for yourself, the Android’s JIT team used my application to check the performance of the JIT compiler! Saying that again, I am SO excited :D

If you want some explanation on the statistics, I concluded to the following:
Using JIT makes the BenchmarkPi application to run nearly 2 times faster, while all the other benchmark programs are running 4 to 6 times faster. This is ought to the complexity of the Pi calculation algorithm that is not that easy for the JIT compiler to analyze and find the hot spots even if it is heavily based on some loops.

The difficulty of the JIT profiling the application can also be noticed to the amount of RAM the JIT uses for the profiling.

You can download the BenchmarkPI application by searching it at the Android Market, or by visiting this site.

BenchmarkPi has a (horrible, I admit it) website here.

I was planning a big update for this app, now I’m certainly sure I’ll start it as soon as possible.

I really advice you to watch the video, it’s impressive how much faster the Android will be with the JIT compiler since Froyo 2.2.

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