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Comment by jsherer | Hacker News Reader

After updating my dev tools through the SDK, I wondered why I couldn't run an x86 system image. The update doesn't select it for installation by default. Selected "Intel Atom x86 System Image" for the Android 2.3.3 system and everything works. Seems a little bit faster. Though, I really wanted to test it out with Android 4.0.

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I was testing this last night. It reduced the time for the emulator to cold boot from 120-130 seconds down to 45-55 seconds. Not as snappy as the iPhone simulator, but over cutting the time by over half is really substantial. Props to them.

I just tested it on my Lenovo Thinkpad T420. Takes about 65 seconds using a VM with the 2.3.3 ARM image, and 6 seconds using the 2.3.3 x86 image taking advantage of my CPUs VT instructions...

Literally 6 seconds after typing "emulator-x86 -avd TestImage -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm" and hitting return, until I'm at the Android login screen.

This laptop has an i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 8GB of RAM and an SSD.

You can still get GPU emulation on Android 4.0 - this isn't tied at all to the x86 images for 2.3.3. When creating an image, just make sure to set the hardware property "GPU Emulation" to "yes" (you can do this by creating a new emulator, or editing a current one, going to "Hardware" at the bottom, clicking "New" on the far right, selecting "GPU Emulation", hitting okay, double clicking on GPU Emulation in the property list and setting it to "yes").

> Last week’s r17 developer tools release included x86 system images and host drivers

I am confused by this announcement. Does that ^ refer to the 2.3.3 version?

I don't see any x86 for 4.0+. What am I missing?

No, this blog post referring to GPU emulation and some improvements they've made to floating point emulation.

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