| Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
17:02 - Welcome news
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-coreduo.ars/4
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Evidently the Intel iMacs aren't orders of magnitude faster than their G5 predecessors on native software... but Rosetta performance, which is arguably more important at this stage, is encouraging:
When an application launches, the system looks to see if it's a Universal Binary. If not, the application is launched using Rosetta. Rosetta runs in the same thread as the application, and translates blocks of code as they come up. The translated code is then optimized, and is cached for reuse. So if an application is reusing the same piece of code, you will see a performance benefit, since the translation needs only occur once.
When Rosetta was announced, there was a lot of speculation over how well it would work. In a news post from August 2005, Hannibal wondered if it would be "usable, mostly usable, or barely usable." I'm here to tell you it's usable.
The world of operating system and platform emulation is a somber one; you seldom hear anyone crow giddily about the speed of any full-scale emulator. If Rosetta earns a "usable" from Ars Technica, I'd say it's already off to a better start than most emulators in recent memory.
Via Daring Fireball.
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Brian Tiemann
