Samsung says TouchWiz launcher using Vulkan API could help extend battery life in Galaxy devices
Samsung seems to be moving in the right direction, at least in regards to their custom launcher featured in TouchWiz. Yesterday at Samsung’s Developer Conference, the South Korean giant announced plans to rewrite the TouchWiz launcher to take advantage of new battery saving features inside the Vulkan API.
For those who aren’t sure what Vulkan is and why it matters to you, here’s a brief description that was provided in the 2nd release of the Android N Developer Preview:
“Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API which we’ve helped to develop as a member of Khronos, geared at providing explicit, low-overhead GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) control to developers and offers a significant boost in performance for draw-call heavy applications. Vulkan’s reduction of CPU overhead allows some synthetic benchmarks to see as much as 10 times the draw-call throughput on a single core as compared to OpenGL ES. Combined with a threading-friendly API design which allows multiple cores to be used in parallel with high efficiency, this offers a significant boost in performance for draw-call heavy applications.”
That may sound like a bunch of gibberish, but Vulkan API essentially helps alleviate constraints on the battery that games and apps can cause on Android devices.
As for how it would affect the TouchWiz launcher, Samsung has been already working on integrating the new API and observed a 6.40% power consumption difference on a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. The example that was provided by Samsung states that with the 3,600mAh battery found on the S7 Edge, battery life was extended at least 40 minutes longer when using the Vulkan API.
It’s not really known whether Samsung is taking this serious enough to where it replaces the current version, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Since battery life is a big complaint on most smartphones nowadays — and software plays a big part in battery life — this is definitely something we’ll want to keep our eyes on.
[via Android Central]