David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on May 17, 2013 9:29 pm wrote:
> Android applications don't really use GCC as I understand it. They are using Dalvik.

Android has NDK which uses GCC. It was stuck with 4.4.x for a long time which held it back in ARM performance (code gen was a ton worse back then). It's at 4.6.x now which is better.

A lot of things do use NDK, and some of it uses NEON intrinsics or even ASM. Think about all the software that's available on both iOS and Android. Writing a common core in something like C++ is usually a lot less work than

A lot of libraries and middleware use NDK too.

And maybe most relevant, most of the non-Javascript benchmarks (although unfortunately Javascript still make up a big chunk). The Javascript benchmarks are not that representative of anything outside of web browser performance and even that can be questionable, but as far as a lot of people are considered phones and tablets are just web browsing devices so maybe that's fair.

> So you're comparing two entirely different software stacks and trying to draw
> conclusions. Moreover, my understanding is that Moorestown actually matches
> the A9 and A15 on quite a few benchmarks (based on discussions with Anand).
>

What Moorestown hardware was even tested? Or are you just calling it all the same?

I've seen one Atom core running two threads do well against one A15 core, but I haven't seen any single threaded scenarios where the Atom wins.