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ARM DS 5 CE Includes a Debugger and Analyzer of Android Native Code

Posted by Abel Avram on Dec 01, 2011

Sections: Development
Topics: Debugging ,; Profilers ,; Android ,; Programming ,; Performance & Scalability ,; Mobile ,; Native Apps ,; Operating Systems ,; ARM

ARM is offering a community edition of their Development Studio 5, containing a debugger and a performance analyzer of Android native code.

ARM has announced the release of Development Studio 5 (DS5) Community Edition (CE), a free toolkit that now includes an Android debugger and a profiler for NDK-generated code written in C, C++ or assembly. The visual debugger provides access to processor information including the ARM NEON Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) registers, and it comes as an Eclipse plug-in that uses Android Debug Bridge (ADB). DS5 also contains a profiler and a system analyzer for monitoring performance parameters for application tuning.

ARM claims that the native Android code can run up to 4 times faster than corresponding Java code, making it suitable for CPU intensive tasks such as games and video streaming and processing. They also affirm that ARM native code is easier to port between platforms.

DS5 is a toolkit for optimizing code written for an ARM platform, including a compiler, a debugger, a performance analyzer and a system simulator. Besides the features supported by DS5 CE – debugging NDK code, plus performance charts and bars displaying function calls – the Application Edition includes support for debugging Linux and Android native apps and libraries, a much broader performance analysis set of features, and a Cortex-A8 simulator.

ARM-based processors power most smartphones, and ARM forecasts a domination of the entire mobile landscape by 2015 due to the adoption of tablets. But in the same time Intel is preparing to enter the smartphone market and future versions of Android will support the x86 architecture. Android Gingerbread has been demoed running on Intel Atom, and a commercial version is supposed to be available in January at CES 2012.