Android 5.0 Lollipop is great, but for those on the Nexus 6 there’s no secret there were some troubling performance issues that a phone of its stature shouldn’t experience. We thought much of the issues were due to the infancy of the ART runtime and possibly due to problematic device encryption. We expected much of that to be cleared up with Android 5.1’s arrival.
It was, at least according to some early impressions around the Phandroid office. But what changed to bring about that performance boost, exactly? Google wasn’t keen to go into detail, but renowned kernel developer Francisco Franco gave us a good bit of insight.
Alongside general improvements to the ART runtime as a whole, Google apparently unlocked the device’s CPU to run at full quad-core mode at all times in order to handle task scheduling more efficiently. What this means is that “Job B” no longer has to wait on “Job A” to finish on a certain core before carrying out its task. It can simply jump onto another of three other cores to allow everything else ample time and room to work. Think of it as a one-lane street merging into a multi-lane highway.
Taking things a step further, Google was able to reduce the lag and improve battery life at the same time thanks to disabling a Qualcomm driver that would needlessly boost individual CPU cores whenever tasks migrate from one core to another. Franco says he’d already made these tweaks in his version of the kernel, so kudos to Google for seeing things similarly and following suit.
So if you notice increased performance and improved battery life after upgrading to Android 5.1, it’s not a placebo effect — Google made some significant changes, and the great thing is we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we know to be different in this latest version. Be sure to try Android 5.1 on for size on your Nexus device of choice using one of the available OTA links.
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