[Galaxy Note GT-N7000 Android Development] abufrejoval:
The best way to avoid a pissing contest is to go out and simply measure: I wish I had another Note (1) so I could do a side-by-side comparison.

But since you've already invested into going back to stock, perhaps there is a way we can compare?

First off, I'd like to have an idea about memory footprint: The classic idea is that optimizations often are about loop-unrolling, structure alignment etc. which sacrifice memory consumption for execution speed. ART is quite a different beast from the first Java runtimes in Eclair (which, I believe, did no compilation at all) and of course all thes features of LP must go somewhere meaning DRAM most of the time.

So how big is the userland on 4.1.2?

Which, of course, brings up the next issue: How do you measure and what do you measure exactly?

Some ROMs report a "User Memory" figure and there are plenty of tools, each with different answers, perhaps because they use different sets of APIs to query.

I'd know two out of the top of my head, but I'm perfectly open for others...

On NightOwl 9.0.1 (soon to be outdated ;)) with Bauner's original kernel I get 817MB of usable DRAM on OS-Monitor and 779MB on CPU-Z. Now as OS-Monitor immediately reveals, CPU-Z takes a good pull out of the memory bottle once you run it and--more importantly--doesn't go away immediately once you close it. Instead it probably starts analysing your usage pattern...

Next it would be interesting to compare governors, to make sure that comparisons are on the same baseline and CPU/GPU clock states available, perhaps lowest and highest will do for the moment (100-1400MHz in my case).

That was the easy part :)

Next I guess we'd have to settle on some simple, somehow representative benchmark, which should answer two main questions:

1. Does the OS/runtime impact the memory footprint of the application?

2. Are there significant differences in performance, energy consumption?

Native apps and benchmarks shouldn't perform with any significant difference if memory and governors are similar, because the only possible differentiator would be the Linux kernel, which I believe hasn't even changed (BTW: I find that extrememly interesting and even a bit annoying that nobody seems, including Google on their Nexus devices seems to invest into upgrading kernels: Do they fix the security issues on those ancient kernels? On bauner's 9.0.1 that is 3.0.64, released two years ago yesterday but end-of-life since October 2013 with all 3.0.x releases).

So it should be a nice big Java application with tons of compute intensive Java code and ideally it would run through a log of complex UI dialog simulation and other Android service calls, which aren't storage (too much variance here).

Again we'd need to measure, whether the runtime (ART vs. Dalvik) causes a 1) significant difference in memory consumption of the running application in memory 2) difference in execution speed

The problem that I see there is that most likely there aren't that many of those: Anything really compute intensive either goes native or calls a service to have the number chrunching done by some offload hardware like GPU or DSPs.

Don't know any such benchmark publicly available, although I'm sure tons of these tools exist at Google and with major developers: Perhaps there is a validation suite which can be used?

I guess what shouldn't be compared is the "stock" or built-in browser, because that's comparing completely different applications not Android versions.

What I don't know is how much "Android" there is in Chrome, Firefox, Dolphin, Opera and others: Do they pretty much bring everything with them and use little more than network and file services and from Android or do they Android services in vast amounts? Do they have Android do any of the text and graphics rendering or do they pretty much draw themselves on a bitmap canvas that they just give to Android for the final display? How much Java is there in any of these anyway?

Suggestions? Feedback?

Personally going back to stock is perhaps a good exercise just to see how things have progressed since 2.3.5, but one of the reasons I keep all my devices as current as possible is that I switch very often between devices and like them to behave consistently.

And since PCI-DSS is part of my day job, I get uneasy when the security holes make walls all but transparent.

---------- Post added at 05:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:51 AM ----------

In theory with software you can do anything software can do.

You should get rather decent performance out of the Note hardware on a Windows phone: They really do squeeze good visual performance out of low-end hardware.

But I'm afraid such a port is as realistic as IOS on the Note 1, even if that most likely could also be tuned to run a little smoother if you invest what Apple invests into it.

But neither Microsoft nor Apple are inclined to let this happen and nobody invests major effort into obsolete hardware.

That's why we like enthusiasts like bauner, who do anyway :)