AMD Partners With BlueStacks to Bring Android Apps To Windows 7 & 8

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.  <iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9yJh9wqEi2Y" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0">></iframe>

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