When using Android Virtual Devices, you'll notice that they aren't the most responsive of emulators. This is due to the fact that the AVD emulator does not support hardware GL, and so the GL code gets translated into ARM software, which gets run on hardware emulated by QEMU (QEMU is the hosted virtual machine monitor that AVDs run on top of). Google has been working on this problem, and now, efficient use of the host GPU is boosting speed (SDK 17). Responsiveness has improved on this and above levels of emulator.

Another speed boost can be gained by using Intel's Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM). You can get a 5 to 10 times speed boost on your AVDs that run x86 as it will execute the CPU commands natively.

HAXM works by allowing the CPU commands to be run on your hardware (that is your Intel CPU), whereas earlier, QEMU would be simulating the CPU, and all commands would be through software, which is why the original architecture is cumbersome.

As...