I installed the android SDK and eclipse plugin on my laptop, but I was surprised to find out that the emulator eats up 100% of one of my cpu cores. I have exactly the same setup on a desktop machine that does not have this issue. Both computers are running arch linux and both were updated yesterday.

Granted, the desktop has better hardware than the laptop, but I was expecting to get closer to 50% cpu usage than 100% on the laptop.

Both android virtual devices have the same specs:

CPU: ARM
Target: Android 2.3.3 - API Level 10
Skin: WVGA800
SD Card: 512M
hw.lcd.density: 240
vm.heapSize: 24
hw.ramSize: 256

Laptop host has Intel Core 2 T7200 @ 2GHz cpu with 2Gb RAM.
Desktop host has AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3GHz cpu with 8Gb RAM.

The android emulator uses only 1 core and here are the CPU usage results:
Laptop:

Cpu0  : 22.8%us, 76.5%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  : 11.2%us,  2.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 86.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2055484k total,  1860304k used,   195180k free,     5276k buffers
Swap:  2000088k total,   106872k used,  1893216k free,   350780k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                       
 2026 xyz       20   0  396m 207m 7192 R  100 10.3   4:11.58 emulator-arm    

Desktop:

Cpu0  :  0.7%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  :  1.3%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  :  5.0%us,  1.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 91.9%id,  1.7%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  :  0.3%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   7666324k total,  6506808k used,  1159516k free,  1650960k buffers
Swap:  8988348k total,        0k used,  8988348k free,  2867300k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                            
 2811 xyz       20   0  392m 220m 6276 S    8  2.9   0:33.58 emulator-arm     

Is there any way I can improve the emulator performance on the laptop?

[UPDATE] I ran the emulator with the same settings, on the same laptop under Win7 and after starting up, it didn't use 100% of a CPU core unlike under linux. Also, I tried running the emulator from a terminal in Linux and I get this message when I don't get it under the desktop Linux host:

Could not configure '/dev/hpet' to have a 1024Hz timer. This is not a fatal error, but for better emulation accuracy type: 'echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq' as root.

I'm not really familiar with rtc or hpet, but it doesn't seem that max-user-freq setting does anything, I still get the same warning.