At 07:02 PM 10/26/98 +1100, Huw Davies wrote:
>At 02:08 PM 21-10-98 -0500, John Foust wrote:
>
>>Today's Alpha/MIPS/PPC Windows machines contain an x86 emulation
>>in ROM, used at boot-time to jump into and init the start-up ROMs of
>>Wintel-market add-on cards for video, networking, etc. DEC/Compaq
>>gives away an Intel emulator called FX!32 for Alpha boxes that can
>>run Windows x86 binaries as-is.
>
>Well, FX!32 isn't an emulator, it's a binary level incremental translator.
>Intel code in, alpha code out.
Ah, you're nitpicking. :-) I didn't discuss the algorithms behind
any of the other emulations I mentioned, either. To be fair, DEC's first
press releases on it try to uniformly call it a "translation technology"
although the word "emulate" creeps in a few times.
FX!32 does both what we both might agree is "emulation" (direct
reproduction of the results of each instruction) the first time
it's asked to run an x86 executable.
It caches the translated code of each execution path, and eventually
the app runs faster and faster as more and more is run as translated
code as opposed to emulated instructions. See the white paper at
<
http://www.partner.digital.com/www-swdev/pages/Home/TECH/FX32/fx32.HTML>
- John
Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 09:38:48 GMT