Different CPU architecture support
The developer has the opportunity to optimize an Android application for a separate processor architecture. At a high-level point of view, it is a great feature. However, this feature comes at a significant cost. Let's have a look at the details of this feature.
Available CPU architectures
Here are the architectures currently supported by the NDK build:
- ARM
- x86
- Neon
- MIPS
ARM
ARM stands for Acorn RISC Machine. This is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based processor, mainly targeting embedded or mobile computing. As the base says, it is highly efficient for an operating system such as Android.
Currently, most used processors of the Android platform are from the ARM family. It can be further sub-categorized as follows:
- ARMv5TE
- ARMv7
- ARMv8
x86
Intel introduced the x86 architecture for processors. At first, these processors were mainly used for desktop/laptop PCs. However, they were optimized to be used in mobile devices in the form of Celeron or Atom processors...