The amazing part would be if they developed a special way to do it that runs at 80% efficiency.
Anyone who thinks that "powerpc emulation" will be too inefficient for practical use will probably be proven wrong someday- even if they have facts to back themselves up. It's happened with any new invention, time and time again in the past. Look at what this knowledgeable guy, Professor A. W. Bickerton, said in 1926:
"This foolish idea of space travel is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme of our most violent explosive- nitroglycerine -is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible"
Hell, he even convinced me.
My point is that new developments and ideas can be surprisingly much more better than the classical ways of solving a problem. Maybe Transitive's new product is a completely different way of "emulating" a powerpc processor.
Now here I'm being a bit bold cause I don't know this for sure: I read that the Quicktransit program resides in the hard drives onboard cache, and I'm not sure but it looks like it doesn't emulate a powerpc processor and all of it's functions but translates the program itself to work on the x86.
Anyways they actually replied to my email and here's what they said:
Quote:
Hi Dylan,
great to know that you think our software is cool, we also think it's very neat :-)
We are a technology company and only selling directly to Computer OEMs at the moment, so unfortunately we do not have a version which you can try out, otherwise we would have been happy to send you a trial version.
It's a great idea to play around with Unix at home. The easiest way is to start with Linux which runs very well on PCs. You could try WinLinux
http://www.winlinux.net/ or Knoppix.
Our press release contains all available public information about our announced QuickTransit product family (
http://www.transitive.com/news_quicktransit.htm) and our website has also more info on the underlying technology (
http://www.transitive.com/technology.htm) , which you might find interesting, take a look.
We will update the news section on our website when we have new public information, so please check back to stay updated, I promise it will be interesting.
Frank
---
Frank Weigel - Field Solutions Lead Engineer
Transitive Corporation -
www.transitive.comfrank@transitive.com - (408) 399 6611
It's a good sign that they actually answer their emails.
By the way, what does it take to qualify as an OEM? :D
