What is Neon with respect to Android?

Question

I'm a beginner in Android. My friend heard "Neon". So I did Google and found this

Referring it, Neon is related to multimedia for Android OS or all mobile OS, is it? Please share me more.

score 17 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 01 '11 at 06:56

17

Neon is an ARM co-processor, meant for vector processing. Neon is used for multimedia data processing. It is an optional co-processor, the Android Linux kernel may or may not have support for this. (Eclair days)

However if Google provides any Android Application APIs to access Neon, then you can safely use it in your application.

edited Nov 01 '11 at 06:56

Sathyajith Bhat

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answered Aug 11 '11 at 05:30

Shash316

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I wouldn't call it a co-processor. It's more of an instruction set extension. – Guy Sirton Aug 11 '11 at 05:36

Jake 'Alquimista' LEE · Answer 2 · 2011-11-01T13:53:33.353

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NEON is extremely powerful and easy to program. It doesn't solve performance issues, but simply eliminates them in most cases.

NEON intrinsics suck performance-wise, I suggest writing native codes for NEON.

Java : pistol
C/C++ : assault rifle
Assembly : machine gun
NEON : vulcan cannon, or A-10 tank killer

Honestly, I'm not exaggerating in any way. NEON is THAT powerful.

edited Nov 01 '11 at 13:53

answered Oct 31 '11 at 07:08

Jake 'Alquimista' LEE

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Anybody else think Star Trek only to find out a vulcan cannon is a machine gun? – braden Mar 02 '15 at 19:10
just love your comparison! :D – Shades88 Oct 28 '15 at 11:57

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 08 '16 at 22:19

There is an official usage example in the NDK source reproduced at: https://github.com/android/platform_development/tree/android-6.0.1_r16/ndk/samples/hello-neon

It is used from NDK, so the interesting files are the .c files under jni/.

You can build and install it with:

ndk-build
android update project -p . -t android-22
ant clean
ant debug
ant installd

What is Neon with respect to Android?

3 Answers3