According to developers, certain changes in Android 5.1 Lollipop are responsible for the performance boosts in Google Nexus 6. Beyond the official changelog, a number of changes have been observed in Android Lollipop 5.1 OS. The update started rolling out earlier last month. The developer reports that quite a few new changes will optimize the overall performance and battery life of the Nexus 6.
According to a developer, Francisco Franco, Google has introduced some changes in Android 5.1 which will directly affect the performance of the Nexus 6 smartphone, making it faster than before. With this new update, all the four cores in the Snapdragon 805 chipset of Nexus 6 will run all the time. Earlier, it was seen that based on the performance load, a few cores remained idle. The changes will not only boost performance when the cores are in use, but it will also save the time of activating all four cores whenever needed.
Earlier, all of the cores did not run at the same time in order to save battery life. Presently, with all cores running at the same time, the users will definitely notice a drop in the battery life. However, Google has also made certain adjustments that will further promote a boost in the battery life as well. In his Google+ account, Franco also stated that Android 5.1 Lollipop update will disable the integrated thread migration boost routines.
Due to this Qualcomm feature, the clock speed of core A was boosted when it was handed a thread from core B. It was accomplished in order to reduce any lag in the system. Since this particular feature has been disabled, it will result in a significant increase of the battery life. With both these changes balancing each other out, users will surely notice a boost in the current battery life.
Furthermore, the developer talked of improvements in Android Runtime (ART) and framework optimization resulting in performance boosts. He is not aware of any further improvements on the kernel since the source is not up yet. On a more official approach, it was declared that multiple SIM card support has been introduced by the Android 5.1 Lollipop update.