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It’s been awhile since AMD held the performance crown over Intel in the CPU wars, but then again, performance isn’t the only way to win customers. The Sunnyvale California based chip maker has a few more tricks up their sleeve, and have partnered up with a company called BlueStacks to offer up an Android emulator capable of running over 500,000 pre-existing Android apps. The emulator will be optimized for AMD CPU’s going forward, however both AMD and Intel users can download a free version of the software right now.
Desktop users might not find much use for the feature, but where this would really make sense is on Windows 8 tablets. The new Microsoft Windows 8 store currently only offers around 2,000 apps, and it has some pretty glaring omissions when compared to iOS and Android. The emulator would distinguish AMD powered tablets in the market place, and give them an interesting advantage over Intel.
According to BlueStacks: "We've worked closely together to optimize the performance of the apps for AMD's unique 'graphics and computing on one chip' setup. The result is awesome - mobile apps run beautifully on their machines." This doesn’t mean the emulator will never make its way to Intel chipsets, but my magic eight ball says the outlook is not so good as long as the payments from AMD keep rolling in.
Both Intel & AMD users can download the beta version of the BlueStacks App Player from their website, however it will no doubt be locked to AMD hardware in the near future.
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Comments are closed on this article
loozer
October 01, 2012 at 8:48am
It's funny, since bluestacks currently works lot better with intel tech. Hopefully, that will get better soon, so that I can run android stuff on my AMD computers.
Andrew.Hodge
September 30, 2012 at 4:29pm
Emulation and compatibility layers for Android seems to have become the underdog's best friend as of late. I think I like the BlackBerry version better than this though. seems a little more "integrated", but you can't really integrate this into windows like rim could to bbos. One thing that you could integrate this into well, though is Linux. I don't see that happening soon, though. Guess I'll have to make do with wine for now till I decide on whether or not to get win 8.
HiGHRoLLeR038
September 30, 2012 at 4:27pm
cmon, wouldnt it make sense to port these to windows PHONE?! iM SO SICK of having a phone with no freakin apps. I didnt think it would bother me that much.
illusionslayer
September 30, 2012 at 2:34pm
The article say that BlueStacks is 'optimized' for AMDs APUs. All this means is that it's going to run a bit better on computers with AMDs APUs.
It's not going to be deliberately slow on Intel powered machines as that would have a similar affect on older AMD chips, and is, presumably, illegal. (Sabotage and such.)
The other thing that matters significantly is how well the optimization works. Maybe we see a 12% improvement. Maybe it takes the app from being clunky to buttery smooth. Who knows.
I mean, maybe we won't even notice it. It could just be faster in games apps because AMDs IGPs are faster right now.
Hilarity
September 30, 2012 at 1:40pm
HA! Intel utterly smashes AMD performance wise. If it works on AMD's hot thirsty crap, it will have no problem on even an i3. The best thing I ever did - upgrade all my systems to Ivy Bridge from shitty APU's and Phenom's (minus the HTPC, which remains on Sandy).
Andrew.Hodge
September 30, 2012 at 5:06pm
Wow. You went through an amazing amount of effort to type all that just to completely miss the point of this article and the product it is about. This isn't about desktops, it's about tablets, and I'm sure that it would destroy I3 on a desktop because this is probably opencl accelerated.
Caboose
October 01, 2012 at 11:53am
Now now, no need to bring any rational or logical thinking in to this. Blind, incoherent ranting is the way of the internet these days!
Cy-Kill
September 30, 2012 at 11:36am
I remember seeing this news elsewhere, and someone asked if it'll work on Intel processors, so my question is the same.
Justin.Kerr
September 30, 2012 at 12:40pm
The beta works on Intel, this is mentioned twice in the post.
Cy-Kill
September 30, 2012 at 1:23pm
BlueStacks was able to work on Intel hardware before this, if it gets locked down to AMD processors, I expect lawsuits to happen.
Captain_Steve
September 30, 2012 at 11:28am
Can't I already do this with the Android developer's tool kit? I thought I was doing this like over a year ago. I didn't realize this was a thing that needed to be made.
