Significant speed boost for Android

 Google gives Android a speed boost with upgrade of memory management

Android is soon about to get a nice little performance boost that should make it faster and more efficient than before. Specifically, Google is working on making its OS support hardware with 16KB page sizes. Google has announced that it’s going to be giving developers on Android the option to switch between 4 KB and 16 KB page sizes. In layman terms, this means you will see an improvement in performance across the board by up to 10%  when apps switch to 16 KB. Following are the some of the important points:-

Android is getting an upgrade which allows it to support a 16KB page size.

The upgrade should result in videos, games and apps running more smoothly.

This will let Android support hardware which runs either 4KB or 16KB pages.

The company published a new post on its Android Developer Blog announcing that Android will soon be page-size agnostic. By page-size agnostic, the firm means Android will support both 4KB and 16KB page devices. The company is opening up the option for developers to switch between 4KB and 16KB on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro with Android 15 QPR1 Beta 1. Page sizes, in simple words, refer to the units of memory that a CPU manages at a time. Hardware has traditionally stuck to 4 KB page sizes, and thus so has the software support for it. With newer processors coming out which support 16 KB page sizes, Google wants to help developers begin the transition.

Google will also be working to bring 16 KB supported development tools and emulators to people making apps for Android. What exactly does this mean for the average user? Not much at the moment, but when more hardware starts supporting this, it will boost performance and efficiency. All in all, Google says the average user should see improvements in video quality, game performance and in how smoothly apps operate.

Now, this all sounds quite exciting, but we’ll have to temper our expectations for now. Yes, this is something that is guaranteed to make our phones feel faster, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen for some time, in fact. In most CPUs, dedicated hardware called memory management units (MMUs) translate addresses from what a program is using to a physical location in memory. This translation is done on a page-size basis. Every time a program needs more memory, the operating system needs to get involved and fill out a “page table” entry, assigning that piece of memory to a process. When the page size is four times larger, there is four times less bookkeeping. So, the system can spend more time making sure your videos look great, games play well and applications run smoothly, and less time filling out low-level operating system paperwork.

Developers are going to have to transition their apps to support 16 KB page sizes. In addition, they’re going to have to learn to use the new tools and emulators coming out. Not to mention the fact that there is still hardware out there that simply doesn’t support 16 KB page sizes. So there might be apps which remain on 4 KB page sizes just so the developers don’t have to work more to ensure compatibility. But whatever apps do transition to 16 KB page sizes will truly feel like an upgrade. And as 16 KB page support becomes more common, more of the best phones out today will start shipping with hardware capable of taking advantage of the larger page sizes.

The motive of this announcement is basically to say that they are enabling support now so OEMs can start getting on board. Google states that it saw a 5-10% boost in overall performance by using larger page sizes. However, there’s a trade-off where 9% more physical memory is used. We’ll need to wait a while before end users around the world could see the benefits of this upgrade.