Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager

Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (or Intel HAXM) is an advanced yet relatively lightweight piece of software that is aimed at Android developers looking for an easy way of speeding up the whole Android development process.

In just a few words, this hardware-assisted virtualization engine provides hardware-acceleration emulation of x86 and x86_64 Android virtual devices (for Android Emulator). To do that, it requires the presence of Android Studio (more specifically of the Android SDK component) on your computer's system and, of course, as its name implies, an Intel processor.

There are two ways of installing Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. You can either install it through Android Studio or by using its dedicated installer and follow the instructions. Since the later is pretty much straightforward, we'll focus more on the first option.

Start Android Studio and launch the Android SDK Manager, go to Extras, and check the box right next to Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM Installer). A more in-depth installation instruction manual can be found on the official website.

If the installation goes according to plan, Intel x86 Android emulator images should be automatically picked up by the hardware-assisted virtualization engine and emulation will be accelerated without any types of user intervention.

There are a few things you can do in order to improve your experience with this tool, as well. First, you might want to enable the GPU acceleration in the AVD Manager, disable Hyper-V if your computer's currently running Windows 8 or higher, and also please note that Avast might interfere with Intel HAXM causing it to run a bit slow. Uncheck "Use nested virtualization where available" feature in Avast's Settings menu, or look for other workarounds here.