What are the advantages of armv7 over armv6 when compiling iPhone apps?

Question

If there are any advantages at all... couldn\'t find anything conclusive in the docs.

Apparently armv7 is for newer version of iOS... is it faster? smaller? Better a

Answer 1

To me, the main advantages of ARMv7 are:

• thumb-2
• NEON

NEON must be explicitly coded for, you don't take advantage of it by simply recompiling, but if you can invest the time it can accelerate multimedia/gaming operations by a factor of 8. However thumb-2 is pretty much a free reduction in code size with almost no drawback (contrary to thumb on ARMv6, which makes floating-point code much slower compared to ARM mode). Of course, adding another version of your executable in ARMv7 will not reduce your executable size, but it will reduce your code in memory, caches, etc.