Intel x86 Android emulator releasedI wanted to try the new Intel x86 emulator for Android today.If you've run the old ARM based Android emulators, you know that things can get terrible when running more recent Android builds. The good news, is that Intel released x86 emulator builds!when you open your Android SDK manager you should see the option to install x86 versions under both Android 2.3.3 and 4.0.3 [ICS]. Pretty good stuff! You'll also need to install the Intel Hardware Acceleration package in the Extras section of the SDK Manager as well.To get setup just follow this guide provided by Intel:Installing the Intel Atom imageSome other requirements include ensuring that your processor supports and has enabled VT mode. If you see a message saying:emulator: Failed to open the HAX device!HAX is not working and emulator runs in emulation modeemulatoremulator: Open HAX device failedThen you likely haven't enabled VT in your BIOS. This was a problem I ran into on my laptop. After enabling VT, I got this message.HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virt modeSomething else you might run into is if Android complains that it can't start when trying to run an ICS based ROM. You'll see a message saying:Failed to allocate memory: 8 This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.By default, ICS will configure itself with 1024M ram. This may be excessive for your emulator, if you bring it down to a more reasonable 512, you'll likely be able to start the emulator.All in all, I haven't seen a huge improvement in my performance, nothing like the videos at least. Which kind of feels like I got treated to something that sounded awesome, but tasted terrible : [ Maybe it's my underpowered video card.UPDATE:I must have forgot to enable a couple settings in my default emulator. Enable GPU emulation as a AVD argument.Under Edit AVD, edit your AVDUnder hardware click NewEnable GPU EmulationSPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED
Mobile/Android