Bill Dawson wrote:
> FWIW
>
> "A startup claims it has created software that lets programs run on any
> operating system?and any processor?without slowing down. Is the hype for
> real this time?"
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/09/wo_hellweg091704.asp?p=0
>
> or
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3l3px
What they are doing is something similar to what Apple did for the 68K
to PowerPC transition. If you look at Transitive's own website, they
admit that the emulation has overhead. I think their claim is that they
are around 80% of native performance on comparably-powerful hardware,
and that in the expected scenario of bringing legacy software forward to
a newer platform, the newer harware would make up the difference.
With modern dynamic translation techniques, emulation can be this
efficient, though performance can vary considerably with characteristics
of the workload -- dynamic translation schemes are like caches, and are
sensitive to program locality, among other things. It could very much
be real, in a useful and pragmatic sense, but there's no magic there.
--Bill
Received on Fri Sep 17 2004 - 07:04:59 BST