Android L 64-bit preview finally released – but only for x86. Where’s ARMv8, Google?

After announcing that Android L would support 64-bit hardware way back in June, Google has finally released a 64-bit Android L developer preview emulator image. Curiously, though, it’s a 64-bit image for 64-bit Intel chips (Atom/Bay Trail) and not ARM. With Nvidia’s 64-bit Tegra K1 supposedly just around the corner, but no tools for developers to actually create or prepare 64-bit ARMv8 apps, what exactly is going on?

Android L — most likely Android Lollipop 4.5 or 5.0 — was originally unveiled at Google I/O in June. At the time, Google’s Sundar Pichai told us that Android L would support “64-bit CPU architectures.” Another Googler, David Burke, said “We’ve adapted and optimized the entire platform to take advantage of the new 64-bit architectures.” The general expectation was that Android L would be released some time in October, close to the release of iOS 8 and alongside a new Nexus device (either the Nexus 9, Nexus 6, or both). The Nexus 6 will probably be a standard 32-bit Snapdragon-powered device — but the Nexus 9 is widely expected to be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra K1 SoC, with 64-bit Denver CPU cores.

Oddly, though, after that brief mention of 64-bit support at Google I/O, the Android team has been fairly quiet about actually deploying 64-bit support — until now, with this morning’s release of the x86-64 Android L developer preview emulator image. You can download it by opening up the Android SDK Manager and downloading Intel x86 Atom_64 System Image and Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM installer). The HAXM installer then needs to be run independently (it’s in the sdk\extras directory). Then just create a new Android Virtual Device (sdk\tools, then android avd) and use the Intel Atom (x86_64) Android L emulator image.

Personally, I couldn’t get the 64-bit version of Android L to run in an emulator — I just got a black window. If anyone can successfully get it to work, do let me know in the comments.

According to Google, the 64-bit version of Android L will increase the amount of addressable memory space, allow for a larger number of registers, and introduce new instruction sets. Except for more registers, none of these features offer a particularly compelling reason to develop 64-bit apps — but on the operating system side of things, the 64-bit version of Android could be a lot faster and more stable than the 32-bit version. If Google puts enough resources into 64-bit Android, anyway.

Which brings us back to the question raised at the start of this story: Where is the ARMv8 version of Android L? I don’t know the exact provenance of the x86-64 Android L image, but I suspect it was mainly developed by Intel and not Google. (Intel has a big Android group that also developed a 64-bit version of KitKat for the handful of Android tablets with 64-bit Atom chips.) Considering the vast majority of Android devices run some kind of ARM SoC, you would assume that Google is personally working on the ARMv8 version of Android L, rather than leaving it to Nvidia, but who knows.

In any case, if we’re actually to see a decent 64-bit version of Android L this fall, and some 64-bit apps that can take advantage of Nvidia’s awesome new K1 SoC, then Google does need to get a move on.