[rescue] From Macintouch

[Micah R Ledbetter]

On Jun 6, 2005, at 17:38, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:
> Also, though I've not seen/heard the keynote myself, they say that
> Apple is telling us that there will be a PPC emulator (this one?
> http://www.transitive.com/) that runs PPC software on x86 and x86
> software on PPC with "nearly" no performance hit. Uhh, what? Any info
> about this? Sounds utterly ridiculous to me.

Oops, sorry to reply to my own post, but according to the document  
that I linked earlier ("Universal Binary Programming Guidelines", AKA  
UBPG,  http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/ 
universal_binary/universal_binary.pdf), Rosetta is what Apple is  
calling the binary translation software, and it only mentions running  
software compiled for PowerPC on x86. There is no mention of running  
x86 software on the PPC.

Additionally, Rosetta does not support Classic apps or things that  
require processor-specific extensions like Altivec.

The keynote address was quoted as saying it would run PPC binaries  
"nearly" as fast as they ran on native hardware; UBPG does not claim  
this and says that some apps will run much more slowly than they  
would run on native hardware.

UBPG makes me think that it might work like FX!32 did under NT/Alpha.  
It says that it "translates" the binary in blocks as needed and  
caches it for future use. Can anyone who knows more about this type  
of thing comment here?

  - Micah