I want to get the most performance of my mobile application on Android. I would like to know if someone is aware of a trick to check if the phone possesses an FPU.
After some research it seems that using FloatMath class is slower on a unit that possesses an FPU, so I would like to have best of both worlds.
Most newer phones have an FPU, but I would like to get the most performance the device can offer.
It's a Linux kernel underneath, and at least the default Android configuration will mount procfs. That means you can look into /proc/cpuinfo, which on an ARM system looks something like:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 3 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 249.96 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x1 CPU part : 0xc08 CPU revision : 3 [ ... ]
If the "Features" line lists at least vfp, then the ARM SoC has an FPU.
You should be able to read /proc/cpuinfo via Dalvik/Java interfaces, just like a normal file, no privileged access or anything required. I'm not a Java programmer, so leaving that as an exercise to the reader.