Android SDK emulator adds hardware acceleration, gives developers a speed boost,Google updated the Android SDK last month to speed up its emulator with x86 CPU support, allowing developers to more easily work on and test Android apps from their desktops, but it appears that was just a primer for the latest revision. The emulator now supports GPU acceleration for Android 4.0.4, this new version of the sdk tools brings along the all new, blazing fast, GPU accelerated emulator which means that tablet sized emulators should now run much much faster than before, It runs ICS on a tablet sized emulator with blazing fast speed.
Go trough this videos to know how faster it’s http://bit.ly/hwccelerated , http://bit.ly/virtualizationmode
Added GPU Support:
The system image we’re shipping today has built-in GPU support (Android 4.0.4). With Android’s growing reliance on using the GPU to improve performance, the difference is significant. In the video below, the emulator is still interpreting ARM instructions; the performance boost is the effect of putting the GPU to work.
As a bonus, since we’re now supporting OpenGL ES 2.0, your OpenGL games can now run inside the emulator.
Please note that there are a lot of GPUs out there, and we haven’t tested all of them for this beta release, so let us know if you have feedbackor encounter issues.
More Hardware Feature Emulation:
The hardware features of mobile devices are a significant part of what makes them a unique platform for development, so we’re also pleased to announce that in addition to the camera support we added last year, it’s now possible to use a tethered Android device to supply inputs for sensors and multi-touch input.
We’re working on providing emulator support for more hardware features including Bluetooth and NFC.
Improved CPU Performance:
We’ve also improved the CPU performance of the Android emulator. Hardware floating point operation has been available for system images since Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), allowing CPU operations to be emulated roughly twice as quickly.
More info: http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/04/faster-emulator-with-better-hardware.html