Getting Started with Intel® Integrated Native Developer Experience

Intel® Integrated Native Developer Experience (Intel® INDE) is a powerful cross-platform framework for creating applications for Android* and Windows* devices. Intel INDE can be integrated into popular IDEs and provides a complete and consistent set of C++/Java* tools, libraries, and samples for environment setup, code creation, compilation, debugging, and analysis for apps on Intel® architecture-based devices,and select capabilities on ARM*-based Android devices.

Intel INDE helps you set up and maintain the components you need for every step in the development process, allowing you to selectively choose libraries and tools to differentiate and optimize your app. It alerts you when new versions of tools and technology are available and allows you to install them with a click of a button.

Intel INDE can be downloaded here. This product is most useful for those who currently develop or plan to develop Android native code and/or video apps.

Some of the major development tools Intel INDE provides are:

Intel INDE Media Pack
Intel® C++ Compiler for Android
Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB)
Compute Code Builder beta
Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

Intel INDE’s main window looks like this:

On this screen you can chose the components you want to download and install. The Environment Setup and Media components include:

Android Studio
Android SDK
Eclipse* 4.3
Android NDK r9d
Android Design elements
Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager
vs-android* for Visual Studio*
Apache Ant*
Intel INDE Plugins for Eclipse
Intel INDE Plugins for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 (Express Edition not supported)

Users can choose one of three popular IDEs: Eclipse, Android Studio, or Visual Studio. I installed Eclipse because it is my favorite IDE.

Media

Intel INDE Media Pack is included for video applications. Complete information for it can be found here. After installing Intel INDE Media Pack, you can find sample code here: <path_to_media_pack>/samples/

In the root of this directory is the samples.apk, which is the application with all samples. Install this application to your device with the command:

$ adb install <path_to_media_pack>/samples/samples.apk

On the device will appear this icon:

Run this application. You will see the main window listing the samples that come with the Media Pack:

One sample is camera capturing with sepia effect, which looks like this:

All source code is in the <path_to_media_pack>/samples/apps/ and <path_to_media_pack>/samples/effects/ directories. In these directories you can find how the code works, and you can use any effects or applications that interest you.

Intel® C++ Compiler for Android

The Intel C++ Compiler that optimizes code for Intel architecture is now available for Android. This tool is great for applications with complex calculations that can benefit from optimization. According to performance tests, simply recompiling native code using the Intel C + + Compiler can give up to 30% performance increase.

This compiler has a minimal cost (less than $100) but is currently included in Intel INDE for free. So, it makes sense to download and give it a try. After registration you will be given a product key for 12 months.

Intel® Threading Building Blocks

Intel TBB is a cross-platform library of templates for creating parallel programs. It completely abstracts the work of creating synchronization streams of data, hiding the details of the architecture and allowing you to work at a higher level of abstraction. It works on all architectures; the only requirement is Android 4.3 and above.

An example of using Intel TBB can be found here.

Compute Code Builder

The Compute Code Builder (also known as the Code Builder) is the development platform for compute APIs and programmable graphics. The Code Builder provides capabilities for creating, building, debugging, and analyzing Windows and Android applications accelerated with OpenCL™ and RenderScript technologies. This development tool can be used in a standalone environment or be integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse IDEs. You can find detailed information here.

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

Intel GPA provides the following tools for analyzing different factors that influence performance and energy consumption of mobile applications:

Intel GPA System Analyzer displays various performance metrics for the OpenGL ES* API, CPU, and GPU and makes it possible, without changing the code, to experiment with different rendering parameters and see how they affect performance. In addition, the tool allows you to collect data that can be analyzed in more detail. By running the data analysis on the host, not on the Android device, you can almost completely eliminate the influence of Intel GPA System Analyzer on device performance.

Intel GPA Frame Analyzer provides detailed information about the process of constructing each frame on the screen. It allows developers to see how specific drawing functions affect construction of the frame and performance and provides the opportunity to experiment with rendering without making any changes to the application. For example, you can experiment with shaders directly with the built-in editor without changing the code. All changes are immediately visible in the preview and on the connected Android device.

Intel GPA Platform Analyzer allows you to monitor the state of the mobile platform and display the load of the GPU and CPU for each process to see which call leads to performance degradation.

Summary

As you can see, Intel INDE includes many interesting tools that Android developers will find useful, especially those who are or plan to develop native code or video applications.