British processor designer ARM has released a new Community Edition of its Development Suite software, which brings some of the features of the commercial DS-5 native development tools to individuals and small businesses for free. The tools work alongside the existing Android Native Development Kit (NDK), and allow low-level access to the processor in ARM devices — crucial to creating high-performance applications on any platform. Ultimately, this means that apps can be written in native code (C or C++) rather than relying on Java and an interpreter — a combination that’s widely criticised for its inefficiency — and promises up to 4x the performance over Java alone. ARM currently has near-total dominance in Android handsets, with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Samsung’s Exynos, and Nvidia’s Tegra processors all based on the company’s microarchitecture.
ARM releases DS-5 Community Edition toolkit, gives hardware integration to the little guy
ARM has released the first Community Edition of its DS-5 developer suite, allowing smaller developers the chance to capitalize on the system-level advantages that have previously only been available commercially.
ARM has released the first Community Edition of its DS-5 developer suite, allowing smaller developers the chance to capitalize on the system-level advantages that have previously only been available commercially.
The toolkit will allow smaller developers to exploit the same deep-level integration that currently only larger firms can afford, and could mean that apps across the Android Market will become less power-hungry. This isn’t an entirely charitable gesture on ARM’s part, though: by providing these tools, it could help maintain its competitive advantage as Intel prepares to enter the race.
