ARM Community: Developing Top Performing Graphics Applications for Android Made Easy - ARM Community

The new DS-5 Community Edition brings CPU and GPU statistics together to speed up Android games and applications

Game Developers Conference (GDC), San Francisco - These are very special days for Android application developers targeting ARM processor-based devices.

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  On March 2^nd the version of the ARM® Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) toolchain dedicated to Android native application developers, the DS-5 Community Edition (CE), was selected as finalist for the Eclipse Community Awards in the Best Developer Tool category.
• Then, on Monday, March 5^th, ARM announced a new version of DS-5, including major updates to its Community package.
• Finally, on March 7^th, ARM will be kicking off its hackathon at the Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup.

What’s New in DS-5 Community Edition v5.9?

For a start, the DS-5 CE has now become free of charge for all users, regardless of company size or type of usage. Nonetheless, it is on the technical front that the new release stands out. The ARM Streamline™ Performance Analyzer within DS-5 CE v5.9 brings together in-depth performance statistics from both ARM Cortex™-based application processors and ARM Mali™ graphics processing units (GPU), making it easier for developers to create high performance graphics-bound software.

How am I utilizing CPU and GPU system resources?

The combined system level analysis tool captures data from the CPU and the GPU hardware performance monitoring units (PMU), Linux kernel, and Mali OpenGL® ES API to enable quick identification of system bottlenecks. Streamline’s flexible framework can even bring snapshots of the frame buffer onto the Timeline to offer visual correlation between screen content and performance issues. Take a look at the video below to see this in practice on DS-5 Professional. All GPU related performance metrics are available across the three DS-5 editions.

Profiling on an ODROID using ARM Streamline Performance Analyzer


Finally, following the suggestion of many DS-5 users in our technical forums, the new release also supports 64-bit Linux host environments. All these features make DS-5 CE v5.9 the perfect companion for the Android NDK for the creation of fast native applications and games.

Are you around the Valley this week?

Join us at the Game Developers Conference 2012 and the Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup.

Game Developer Conference 2012

Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup

Want to learn more about ARM tools?

• Visit www.arm.com/ds5 to download DS-5
• Visit www.malideveloper.com for more tools for Mali GPU

Guilherme Marshall, Product Marketing Manager, ARM, joined ARM in 2010 to bring to market innovative software development solutions that help making ARM the favorite architecture of software engineers. Scarred from over ten years in the technology sector (and some infuriating home DIY experiences), Guilherme appreciates the importance of having the right tools for the job and is therefore committed to make the life of software developers less challenging.