We have decided to move to the Ubuntu Linux platform for our android development. Our builds using the Android NDK are faster, and getting the Operating System up and running was a considerably faster process than installing Windows XP (and subsequent system updates). The decision to change came about when the NDK cygwin builds were getting much too long when we added the ARM7 architecture instructions for newer android phones.
Speaking of the ARM7 instructions, we saw a minor boost in performance on the Nexus One, but nothing to what we were expecting with the extra floating point registers available on the processor. This leads me to believe we either missed some setting when compiling the project for the NDK, or we’re limited by something else altogether. We might be limited by the graphics or we might be slowed down since we are using 32-bit floats instead of 64-bit doubles. The latter possibility doesn’t seem like it would be a large issue. The reason I mention the 32-bit / 64-bit possibility is because I read somewhere that the extra floating point registers were 64-bit, not 32-bit.
