ARM Community: Top 2011 ARM Software blogs: Android, NEON, RISC vs CISC & Assembly - ARM Community

2011 was a busy year for developing software on ARM and the activity is reflected in the page views of top Software Enablement blogs. The topics included managing caches, Android (multiple), NEON (multiple), Memory Access Ordering, RISC vs CISC architectures (multiple), and optimizing assembly code (listed by popularity below). In addition, the Software Enablement Community pages (Linux, Solution Center for Android, RTOS, Microsoft, etc) were some of the highest referenced pages on the ARM site. Please let us know if you have more ideas for easing your software development on the ARM architecture.

1) Caches and Self-Modifying Code by ARM Jacob - 5 comments
Ideally, caches act as some magic make-it-go-faster logic, sitting between your processor core (or cores) and your memory bank. Whilst it can be beneficial to consider specific cache features when writing some performance-critical code, it is usually advisable to consider only general cache behavior in mind.

2) From Zero to Boot: Porting Android to your ARM Platform by ARM Vassilis - 12 comments
This article describes how to get Android running on your favorite ARM-based System on Chip (SoC) board. We run through the overall procedure and point out potential pitfalls and other things that you may encounter.

3) Coding for NEON – Part 1: Load and Stores by ARM Martyn - 1 comment
Coding for NEON - Part 2: Dealing With Leftovers - 4 comments
Coding for NEON - Part 3: Matrix Multiplication
Coding for NEON - Part 4: Shifting Left and Right - 8 comments
Optimizing DirectFB with ARM NEON by Kui Zheng - 1 comment
ARM's NEON technology is a 64/128-bit hybrid SIMD architecture designed to accelerate the performance of multimedia and signal processing applications, including video encoding and decoding, audio encoding and decoding, 3D graphics, speech and image processing.

In addition, we’re planning to add more posts to this popular series in 2012: the next one will be “Coding for NEON - Part 5: Permuting Vectors”. Watch this space! For more examples of using NEON, Yang Zhang posted a series of 3 posts on x264 on ARM: Bringing a wider application of video conferencing.

4) 10 Android NDK Tips by ARM DaveB
With new devices and new capabilities being exposed by the Android NDK (Native Development Kit) it is now possible to really get the best out of these ARM based devices. Here are a few quick tips to help that along.

5) RISC versus CISC Wars in the PostPC Eras – Part 1 by David Patterson, UC Berkeley - 2 comments
RISC versus CISC Wars in the PostPC Eras – Part 2 - 10 comments
This two-part blog gives a historical perspective on the ARM vs. 80x86 instruction set competition for three eras: PrePC (late 1970s/early 1980s), PC (mid 1980s to mid 2000s), and PostPC (late 2000s onward).

6) Google’s V8 on ARM: Five Times Better by ARM Martyn - 6 comments
The modern web is built primarily from three technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is JavaScript that drives the interactive web; slow JavaScript means slow web pages. So today, a huge amount of effort is being put into improving the performance of JavaScript, giving us access to powerful web applications, with features from your desktop, but available wherever you are.

7) Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) NDK now close to pure Native Development by Seth Bernsen
With the recent release of Gingerbread and the number of daily Android on ARM activations up to 300,000 (see James Bruce’s blog), the opportunity for developers has never been better. The tools developers have to work with have also never been better. The Gingerbread update brings a strong focus on enabling the developer to create premium content for a rapidly growing consumer market.

8) “Hello World” in Assembly by ARM Jacob
Assembly language can be fairly daunting, even for experienced software engineers. The lists of strange instructions and squiggles can be hard to read at the best of times; indeed, that is why we use languages such as C, where the compiler worries about such things so you don't have to.

9) Memory access ordering – an introduction by ARM Leif
Memory access ordering part 2 - barriers and the Linux kernel
Memory access ordering part 3 - memory access ordering in the ARM Architecture
I recently gave a presentation at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2010 called Software implications of high-performance memory systems. This title was my sneaky (and fairly successful) way to get people to attend a presentation really about memory access (re)ordering and barriers.

10) Condition Codes 1: Condition Flags and Codes by ARM Jacob - 1 comment
Condition Codes 2: Conditional Execution - 1 comment
Condition Codes 3: Conditional Execution in Thumb-2
Condition Codes 4: Floating-Point Comparisons Using VFP - 2 comments
ARM, like many other architectures, implements conditional execution using a set of flags which store state information about a previous operation. I intend, in this post, to shed some light on the operation of these flags.

Lori Kate Smith, Sr. Manager Community Programs, ARM, has the best job at ARM because she gets to work with ARM Partners developing programs that enable broader support for the ARM architecture in her role of managing the ARM Connected Community. She’s passionate about creating communities where engineers can share information, find answers to their questions and talk about cool technologies. Prior to ARM, Lori Kate spent time in multiple different industries including EDA (Cadence, Verisity, Axis Systems), Enterprise Software and dot bomb (HelloBrain), and wireless (Metricom (Ricochet), AT&T, and MCCaw Cellular equally splitting her time between every marketing and buz dev role you can imagine and major account sales. If there’s a new technology to launch or sell, she’s game. Lori Kate even managed to get a few degrees at Santa Clara University (MBA) and Middlebury College (BA.)