Which of Android Virtual Devices (AVD) is faster?

Issue

I've created and run an AVD with CPU/ABI: ARM(armeabi-v7a)

When AVD running, the emulator alerts:

Is Intel x86 Atom System Image AVD faster than Intel x86 Atom_64 and ARM EABI v7a?

Solution

Modern x86 CPUs support hardware virtualization, so you can run an x86 Virtual Machine at near-native speed on x86 hardware (if you set up the appropriate stuff for your VM to use hardware virtualization, like Harkirat's answer mentions). This applies to x86 and x86-64 VM images.

An ARM VM on x86 hardware has to be emulated, which is much slower.

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Is Intel x86 Atom System Image AVD faster than Intel x86 Atom_64?

No, I would expect that 64-bit and 32-bit Atom VMs run at nearly equivalent speeds.

Is Intel x86 Atom System Image AVD faster than ARM EABI v7a?

Yes, and the factor of 10x sounds reasonable.

Answered By - Peter Cordes