The start-up company “Transitive Technologies” announced at the Microprocessor Forum that its translation software “Dynamite P/X” would run PowerPC software on an Athlon PC (1.4 GHz) with the performance of a gigahertz PowerPC. The software uses roughly the same translation technique as Transmeta’s Crusoe processor, i.e. a translation cache and dynamic optimisation at runtime. Transitive also offers such translations for other processors. There is apparently also a variant that translates 68k instructions so that they can be executed by an Athlon or Pentium CPU. Considering that today’s Intel processors or their compatibles sometimes run at 2 GHz, interesting possibilities could arise here. Whether a low-cost, modern TOS computer could be created in this way by a third-party supplier, however, must first be evaluated.
The comment:The following question arises: what advantages does Dynamite P/X have over a modern, highly optimised emulation? Ultimately, Dynamite P/X is nothing else – with the difference that apparently no host system is assumed. But then the usual questions arise that are unavoidable with a “native” solution: where do drivers come from, e.g. for USB printers, who is supposed to write them? Under an emulation like MagiCMac, for example, this problem does not exist, because most of the peripherals registered under Mac OS can also be used from the Atari side.
So once again, we should warn against euphoria – after all, there are already functional solutions that are just waiting to be used and optimised. Today’s hardware is getting faster and faster, so there are many advantages to using a host system like Mac OS, but fewer and fewer disadvantages.
