MobileMonday Global

^{Symbian working on SMP support} Nokia to accelerate 2D graphics and MP3 music

Nokia plans to start using hardware acceleration also for 2D graphics and data encoding. This will help to make up for the relatively heavy and slow Symbian operating system.

Lee Williams, SVP R&D, S60 Software, Nokia, said last week at S60 Summit 08 in Barcelona that Nokia pays attention to the information that Symbian is slower than its competing operating systems.

"Different operating systems have different capabilities and this explains the results. This does not mean that there is a need for radical changes in Symbian. There are other ways to speed up the performance."

The slowness of Symbian - compared to Windows Mobile 6 and Linux operating systems – was revealed last month in Futuremark’s performance benchmark testing.

Benchmarking specialist Futuremark recently released test suites that allow comparisons also across different operating systems. Nokia’s best device is a way ahead in hardware accelerated 3D results but falls behind in main processor dependent 2D and encoding /decoding tests. (For results see the table below.)

According to Williams Symbian offers developers broad support for different functions and this makes it heavy. Moreover, it includes certain processes that have been designed to be slow to use very little power. This is a must for mobile devices.

“There are lots of ways to improve performance. We plan to add hardware acceleration for 2D graphics and decoding MP3 music. We need this since we are looking to empower our handsets to play hundreds of hours MP3 music.”

Williams represents Nokia in the Symbian’s advisory board and he is well versed is performance issues. Another way to pump more power in into Symbian devices would be symmetrical multiprocessing, SMP).

“We have been working for a while on SMP support.” Williams is mum on possible timetables.

Over 400 developers participated in Nokia S60 Summit 08 event May 28-29 in Barcelona.

Symbian loses in test results
Device	HTC WinMobile 6	Nokia N93i Symbian 9.x	Nokia N810 Linux
Test, bigger is better
SPMark score, 1)	2392	4951	3734
3D score, 2)	176	6852	138
System score, 3)	4688	1518	12586
3D Game Test	1,72	72,28	0,62	Frames / second
3D Fillrate	0,73	27	0,66	Mtexels / second
3D Polycount	8,96	549	13,23	Ktriangels / second
Järjestelmätestit
2D Image, 4)	174,26	64,19	67,85	Frames / second
Image scaling, 5)	85,17	6,2	89,23	Bitmaps / second
JPEG Encoding, 6)	1334,2	1228,06	1498,39	Kpixels / second
Contacts, 7)	17,88	11,17	41,67	Contacts / second
Calendar, 8)	15,42	7,52	N/A	Events / second
Disc Access, 9)	25,77	38	830	Files / second

Source: Futuremark. 1) Overall Score of Performance, 2) Overall 3D Performance Score, 3) Overall System level Performance Score (basic usefulness score), 4) Performance of 2D Image Drawing Operations, 5) Performance of Image Scaling Operations, 6) Performance of Image Covertion/Encoding Operations, 7) Basic Contacts Application Test from Performance/Usefullness point of view, 8) Basic Calender Application Test from Performance, 9) Performance of memory (file open/save/delete) operations

 

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