ART is considered to be Dalvik 2.0. The main reason is that many of the choices made by Dalvik are no longer relevant in the current technical environment. SO

ART is considered to be Dalvik 2.0. The main reason is that many of the choices made by Dalvik are no longer relevant in the current technical environment. SOCs have evolved a lot since Android 1.0 . I doubt that ARM vs Intel has a lot of weight from Google's point of view.. it is not really Google's issue. We can also hypothesize that ART more pluggable architecture is here to allow Google to maybe switch languages at some point in the future. There is nothing official in that regard though, quite the contrary (cf the I/O fireside chat where the Android team clearly said that Java is Android's language). So, either they are working on a replacement language in secret or this is just a nice result of the new build system and runtime.