Rosetta Question

There have been some updates to Rosetta to increase the speed. Hopefully there will be more!

 

Well if history is any indicator, Apple isn't very good with emulation speeds. Look how aweful 68k emulation was on PowerPC Macs. In fact, a third party company made it's own version of 68k emulation for PowerPC Macs which became one of the most popular system add-ons ever, Connectix SpeedDoubler 8. Perhaps something like that will be released for PowerPC on Intel emulation. It's a shame Connectix doesn't exist anymore.

 

I think the speed of Rosetta is incredibly impressive. Sure, you CAN bog it down with heavy pro apps like CS2, but for the most part, it runs so well that most of us forget it is even running (unless we are short on RAM). It is fantastic emulation.

 

Rosetta is already quite speedy, but only with enough RAM. The real question is what you consider fast enough. CS2 on an Intel Mac with 2GB of RAM is already faster than on most G4 Macs.

 

And if history is any indicator, Apple's new Mac Pro will be beige.

 

Probably not for a while at least. Maybe Woodcrest (if it makes it into Mac Pros) will pack enough punch, but I wouldn't count on that kind of speed for a while yet.

And I find it hard to believe that people are actually complaining about Rosetta's speed; have you tried running an x86 app on a PPC processor in VPC recently? You're incredibly lucky if you get 1/10 the speed of a native app out of it. Same goes for all previous PPC emulation on x86 that I'm aware of. The fact that Rosetta can run apps written and compiled for a completely different architecture at a signficant fraction of native speed (as said, enough that most people don't even notice it's running) is, in computing terms, something of a miracle.

And if you have some sort of belief that Apple doesn't like emulation, remember that they didn't even write Rosetta--they bought another company that had come up with an amazingly fast cross-architecture emulation system.

 

A beige G3 looks better than any beige PC I've ever seen.

 

CS1 on my Macbook runs a little faster than on my Powerbook 1Ghz. Except for Indesign mysteriously... But it's all usable.