It’s been months since I’ve written anything here. I’ve been busy with some projects that have taken a lot of time. Usual excuse, huh?
What I’m confronting now are two upgrades of development machines. The machine I’m writing this on is a 4 year old Linux box running Ubuntu Studio. It’s plenty fast except for one thing: it can’t run Android emulators very fast at all.
Seems that each rev of Android needs more speed. After all if they didn’t do that then the hardware manufacturers would go looking for another mobile OS that would get users to buy a new phone every two years.
This AMD CPU lacks some special instructions to speed up Android emulators. It’s not a simple matter of just plugging in a new AMD CPU either. The motherboard is also old and won’t accept newer CPUs. So a new motherboard, CPU and memory is needed. Oh and maybe a new power supply too.
The great thing about Linux is you can just swap out all that and the new system will see the old setup on the hard drive and configure it for the new hardware. Or supposedly. I have my doubts it will go that smoothly but its something you can’t do that easy with Windows.
Another thing since I built this machine is that AMD boards often come with Radeon GPUs on them. There are some that don’t so if I want to stay with NVidia as there is now on this machine then I need to get a video card too.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. It was much easier to built this machine from scratch than to upgrade it. And then we have the other problem: my Windows machine is 5 years old, a 64-bit AMD Windows 7 machine. Google for some unknown reason only supports virtualized Android emulators on Windows Intel based machines even though they support AMD on Linux. So a new Windows machine is in order too. I use the Windows machine for additional testing, some cross development, graphics, video and 3D animation authoring.
The only good thing is that desktop sales are in a slump so prices are a bit better. It’s just figuring out just what to get and how much to spend.
Decisions, decisions, decisions.