From the Android NDK example “bitmap-plasma”:

We’re going to perform computations for every pixel of the target bitmap. floating-point operations are very slow on ARMv5, and not too bad on ARMv7 with the exception of trigonometric functions. For better performance on all platforms, we’re going to use fixed-point arithmetic and all kinds of tricks

I stumbled upon this one or two times before. So it really seems like this is an issue needed to be addressed, since I want to do lots of heavy pixel-by-pixel computation stuff (a.k.a. image processing). Maybe there is a better way to do this: instead of translating everything from floating-point to fixed-point operations or even finding and implementing “all kind of tricks”, I could do everything with OpenGL. Android 1.6 supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and from Android 2.0 and up OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported. Such OpenGL-operation are probably performed on the same CPU, but I assume if OpenGL is doing some floating-to-fixed-point translation this is more effective than I could do.