Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance

Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-Faster-Chromium

[ms178]

I hope their optimized Zlib implementation gets used more widely as Zlib's upstream development is very slow and didn't show a lot of interest in these performance optimizations to begin with. There is also a whole project (zlib-ng) dedicated to replace it.

[treba]

...Zlib ... libjpeg-turbo...Harfbuzz

If upstreamed, this should help the whole linux ecosystem. Great to see!

[mrugiero]

If upstreamed, this should help the whole linux ecosystem. Great to see!

And many more, open source or otherwise! It'd be really great, and from the slides it seems some of the changes are either upstream or being pushed.

[ms178]

If upstreamed, this should help the whole linux ecosystem. Great to see!

Since 2017 ARM tried to upstream their optimization work with no sign in sight if it will be pulled at all:

1) https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/251
2) https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/345

And as you see in my comment above, I've lost my hope that upstream Zlib will move any further with this (and other work pending review there). It's about time that a fork/downstream project takes its place which is better supported / maintained.

[schmidtbag]

I was happy to see the headline, but was happier to find out that the optimizations aren't strictly for Chrome, but could affect other software too.

[edwaleni]

I was happy to see the headline, but was happier to find out that the optimizations aren't strictly for Chrome, but could affect other software too.

I agree. Brave, Vivaldi and Edge will all benefit downstream of Chromium. Since I assume the benefits will also be cross platform, this possibly can help the Chromium/Power release as well.

[squash]

These improvements have been ongoing since the introduction of ARM based Chromebooks years ago. Obviously they have a ways to go but that experience has always been "ok" if not great. As they progress I hope that it can make the difference for platforms like the Pi 4 becoming a truly viable desktop replacement for modern workloads.

[wizard69]

These improvements have been ongoing since the introduction of ARM based Chromebooks years ago. Obviously they have a ways to go but that experience has always been "ok" if not great. As they progress I hope that it can make the difference for platforms like the Pi 4 becoming a truly viable desktop replacement for modern workloads.

As nice as PI 4 is I don’t see it becoming a desktop replacement anytime soon. It just doesn’t have the performance no matter the optimization. Beyond that there is a bit of ignorance within the PIotganziation when it comes to 64 bit software / operating systems. Life is far easier when the platform owner drives forward with the latest software features.

One only needs to look at Apple to see the positive impact of forcing developers to the 64 bit world.

[wizard69]

Since 2017 ARM tried to upstream their optimization work with no sign in sight if it will be pulled at all:

1) https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/251
2) https://github.com/madler/zlib/pull/345

And as you see in my comment above, I've lost my hope that upstream Zlib will move any further with this (and other work pending review there). It's about time that a fork/downstream project takes its place which is better supported / maintained.

There is also value in understandable, easy to debug code. I have no idea what the ZLibs thought processes are with respect to optimized code, but I would not be surprised that maintainability and correctness are high on their list. Which makes me wonder how much effort the ARM team has put into validating their submissions.