Strange AIR performance; == faster than ===

Question

Hi.
I have been hunting down some strange memory usage in one of our games, and tracked it down to numbers being compared to 0.0 in a loop.
I have concentrated the observations down to a small profile snippet.
Observations:
1) I expected the first two profiles to take the same amount of time as everything is typed. But comparing a Number that is a natural is a LOT faster. (only true on desktop and android).
Why is this, is the jitted versions storing Numbers that are natural (whole numbers) as integers, and thus causing a log of type conversion (and memory allocations)?
2) I have been told (and experienced on iOS) that using the === operator is faster than == when a type coercion is possible, test 1+2 vs. 3+4 shows that this is not always the case on some of the platforms.
Is this normal? have I messed up something when building my air apps? If this is reproducible, can somebody with better knowledge of the internals of the AIR runtime explain when it's better to use === over == (for performance).
private var _unused:Number = 0;
private function profileNumberCompare():void
   var t0:int = getTimer();
   _unused += profileEqEqEq(0.1);
   var t1:int = getTimer();
   _unused += profileEqEqEq(1.0);
   var t2:int = getTimer();
   _unused += profileEqEq(0.1);
   var t3:int = getTimer();
   _unused += profileEqEq(1.0);
   var t4:int = getTimer();
   trace(t1 - t0);
   trace(t2 - t1);
   trace(t3 - t2);
   trace(t4 - t3);
private function profileEqEqEq(inc:Number):Number
   var x:Number = 0.0;
   var z:Number = 0.0;
   for(var i:int = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
   if(x === 0.0) z += 1;
   x += inc;
   return z;
private function profileEqEq(inc:Number):Number
   var x:Number = 0.0;
   var z:Number = 0.0;
   for(var i:int = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
   if(x == 0.0) z += 1;
   x += inc;
   return z;
Results:
Desktop, adl  (E5530 @ 2.4GHz):
1411
171
68
71
ipad4:
52
53
53
55
nexus5:
1230
373
148
146

Answer 1

Since your iPad is only 4 months old, I'd make an appointment at your local apple store and have them check it out.