ARM, Symbian Collaborate To Enable Low-Power Applications

Oct 23, 2008 12:51 PM, MD&D News Staff

As cell-phone features multiply, so do power demands. ARM and Symbian have teamed up to tame these demands with ARM Profiler for Symbian OS. As part of RealView Development Suite 4.0 Professional, ARM Profiler lets developers of mobile-phone applications running on the Symbian operating system (OS) add enhanced features and reduce power consumption.

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According to the companies, developers can quickly and accurately target their optimizations with immediate feedback on actual application performance and with the rapid identification of bottlenecks across a broad range of performance measurements, bringing their applications to market faster and with lower risk.

The ARM Profiler for Symbian OS builds upon ARM’s profiling technology, which enables non-intrusive, long-duration application profiling on hardware or system models; code coverage information, even when source code is unavailable; and the ability to profile fully optimized software.

Furthermore, ARM Profiler can profile applications running on Symbian OS. It provides profile-driven compilation for automatic code optimization based on runtime performance. Also, it provides instruction trace replay for a deeper understanding of application performance.

Many profiling tools require code annotation or system instrumentation, which don’t accurately represent of application performance or allow profiling capabilities only for very short durations due to buffer limitations. ARM Profiler, though, can analyze fully optimized images, analyze for unlimited durations using the streaming trace feature in RealView Trace 2, and profile the instructions executing on the real-time system models from ARM.

In addition, with the capacity to analyze the applications running on Symbian OS, engineers can now obtain deeper insight into how applications are affected by system resources and shared libraries for a better understanding of how applications perform as part of a complex system.

ARM Profiler for Symbian OS is available as part of the ARM RealView Development Suite 4.0 Professional. For more information, visit www.arm.com/products/DevTools/RealViewSoftwareDevelopment.html.