iPhone runs tight loops 50 to100x faster than Android G1
The guys at Occipital planned to develop for Android until they discovered that iPhone (using Objective C) runs a tight loop between 50 and 100 times faster than Android with its Dalvik virtual machine. That’s News you can use. But be careful…
The Android G1 phone has a Java accelerator chip. Dalvik is not Java, but it’s very similar. One might imagine that Google may plan to leverage hardware acceleration to even the playing field vs. iPhone.
One could even speculate that the Android market becomes big enough to make sense for Google to collaborate with a chip outfit to create some Dalvik go-fast silicon.
On the other hand, Apple bought chip developer PA Semi. Rumor has it they are hard at work on a ARM based chip. Lower cost of goods would be a worthy objective, as would higher performance. This game is just beginning.
Dave Winer has this to say about Occipital:
Update: VentureBeat has an excellent description of Occipital. “If multiple people upload multiple photographs from the same event around the same time, Occiptial will figure out that an event just happened and classify the photographs accordingly. Doing this right is really, really hard, yet with two people, Occipital seems to have done it. This team is scary good.”