Using AVX2 With Android's Bionic Library Can Yield Much Better Chromebook Performance

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published a whitepaper looking at the Android application performance impact on Intel-powered Chromebooks when the Android Bionic Library is optimized for AVX2.

To little surprise considering the AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) performance benefits we have seen on the Linux desktop when binaries are built with AVX support, and especially on platforms like Clear Linux that really exploit the potential of these instruction set extensions in modern CPUs, the performance improvement on Chromebooks can be quite profound.

With AVX2 optimizations compared to just SSE for the underpinnings on the ChromeOS support for Android applications, the impact on various apps ranged from less than 1% upwards to around 20%. Google Drive saw a 21% performance improvement while Instagram was up by 17%, two of the big winners. For heavier workloads like a machine learning benchmark, the maximum inference time was 44% lower with AVX2 optimizations.

Only in a few workloads were there performance regressions. Using AVX2 also helped improve the power efficiency in a number of scenarios too. Overall these AVX2 performance improvements for Android apps on Chromebooks is very welcome and quite practical.

Those curious about the AVX2 benefits on Chromebooks can read through Intel's test results and details on 01.org.

With AVX-512 rolling out to more consumer CPUs with Icelake, there will be even more AVX potential on the next-generation Chromebooks as well. Hopefully in 2019 we'll see more software shipping with AVX optimizations by default.