I get all sorts of comments directly to me and I see them posted on many boards.  Generally, people want to know why their phone doesn’t show the leap in the Linpack score when they run Froyo that others see on the Nexus One, Droid Incredible, or the EVO 4G.   The one word answer:  NEON.

After looking into it for a while, I was focusing on what makes the Nexus One so much better than the other phones.  On the chip level, I didn’t see it.  Then it dawned on me to look at what Google had to say on the matter.  Well, it was there in black and white.  In their 20 May 2010 Developer’s Blog entry (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-22-and-developers-goodies.html) they say that people could see a 2-5x speed increase.  I think it is pointed out in an entry later in the blog dealing with NDK, which I initially missed:  “ARM Advanced SIMD (a.k.a. NEON) instruction support The NEON instruction set extension can be used to perform scalar computations on integers and floating points. However, it is an optional CPU feature and will not be supported by all Android ARMv7-A based devices. The NDK includes a tiny library named “cpufeatures” that can be used by native code to test at runtime the features supported by the device’s target CPU.”

So, I guess this means that NEON is the difference.  If your phone’s CPU has it and it’s enabled for JIT, you can expect higher Linpack numbers.