“Way back when, when the first Power Macs hit the streets, I found performance with older Mac apps to be perfectly awful. It seemed as if I had gone back two generations in chip design, from the PowerPC to the 68030, and that was being generous. So when another emulation scheme was announced, Rosetta, which allows Intel-based Macs to run PowerPC software, you had reason to be concerned,” Gene Steinberg writes for Mac Night Owl. “Although they are being coy on the details, Apple’s Rosetta technology is based on QuickTransit, an emulation method from Transitive Corporation. When I taped an interview with Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I had to forgive him if he danced around a few key details because of the company’s deal with Apple.”
“But here are the basics: When you launch a PowerPC application on a MacIntel, Rosetta translates chunks of code into memory. The code is reused as needed when various application features are run. How much memory? Well, in general, according to Wiederhold, their technology will exact a 50% overhead. So, as an example, if a PowerPC app needs 128MB to run, another 64MB will be required for emulation. You’ll need to think about this overhead carefully when you decide how much memory you need to get the best performance for your new MacIntel,” Steinberg writes. “Now Transitive’s own presentation materials on their technology estimates that Rosetta will run at sixty to seventy percent of full processor speed. The tests published so far by Macworld and others are less optimistic, putting the speed hit at fifty percent. So why the disparity? Is Transitive fudging its numbers just a little bit?”
“Well, the magic bullet may very well be RAM, and most of the new iMacs tested so far appear to come with the default 512MB allotment. What if it was increased to, say, 1GB? Good question, and I’ll be interested in seeing the comparisons as testing of the new products continues,” Steinberg writes.
More in the full article here.
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