Posted on 09/14/2004 7:13:21 AM PDT by Tangerine Time Machine
A start-up company plans to release software at the end of this year that it claims will make it possible for applications designed for one platform to run on another at near native speed.
Transitive Technologies Ltd.’s QuickTransit software, which resides in Flash memory or on a computer’s hard drive, decodes application binaries into an intermediate form, optimizes blocks of code and stores them in cache, then encodes for the target processor.
It’s sort of a plug-in approach where companies will be able to mix and match starting and target operating systems, explained vice president of marketing Ed McKernan. “We have a different front end and back end,” he said. “The front end is our decoder. The back end is the encoder part that encodes the optimized block code to the target CPU.”
The QuickTransit software, based on technology from the University of Manchester, differs from other kinds of emulation, such as Microsoft’s Virtual PC software, acquired from Connectix, in that it doesn’t bring up an emulation of the target system’s operating system.
“We’re replacing the system virtualization layer and the operating-system layer,” McKernan said.
In other words, the QuickTransit software performs the role of BIOS and operating system, explained founder and CTO Alasdair Rawsthorne.
The company, which has offices in Manchester, England, and in Los Gatos, Calif., sees three potential markets for the software, which initially will be for servers. The first, said McKernan, is hardware equipment manufacturers that would embed the QuickTransit software in the hardware. McKernan said several telecommunications companies that have legacy software running on MIPS or PowerPC processors, but that want to move to a more available processor, have shown an interest in the software.
IT services companies that are helping firms migrate to other platforms would be a second group of customers, according to McKernan.
The third group is software vendors that could use QuickTransit to migrate their products from one platform to another.
Rawsthorne estimated that applications run at about 80 percent of natural speed using the QuickTransit technology.
Transitive has tested the software on RISC, CISC and VLIW architecture processors, McKernan said.
Transitive plans to charge hardware manufacturers licensing and royalties. ISVs and systems integrators would pay only for the servers that had already licensed the technology.
It takes between six and nine months to develop customized decoding and encoding software, but as the company gets new customers, which in turn means more available decoders and encoders, the time it takes to
This ought to end the computer wars—buy a Mac and run PC-only games; buy a cheap PC and run Garageband and the entire iMac suite of software. I don't know who would be more unnerved by this breakthrough; Apple, Microsoft?
www.transitive.com
Java before Microsoft customized it.
Also see this article:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,64914,00.html
I posted this link apart from the news story in case linking to Wired is banned for some reason (admins can cut this post without taking down the article).
Sounds like Wine.
Can it run IPSO on an intel chipset ? ... enquiring minds :)
Well, if they succeed, that's great. Many have tried. When you can run Word XP for Windows on your UNIX box, I'll believe it.
Trouble is that nowadays most major programs, like the Office suite aren't even single programs any longer, but are collections of modular programming. This will complicate the problem dramatically, since a program's calls to OS functions or to functions in something like a DLL library are going to be a bit harder for this decoder to handle.
Worse, those calls are designed to speed up the program. An intermediate decoder/translator will automatically slow everything down. And with apps like MS Office, that's a real problem. They're already quite slow enough, thanks.
Well, I imagine that companies that want to make their programs hostile to this program can do so. But it'll be a great boon to those with an interest in selling their programs to as wide a market as possible, such as game publishers.
The downside is that such a development might discourage optimized ports to alternative OSs such as OS X and Linux. That would result in a 20% performance tax.
It's a very interesting idea, and one I've heard floated before. As a Mac user, I use a Mac because I love OS X. If I could access a few more games it would be nice, but I might not access that ability; most of the games I play I play on Playstation or XBox. :) I use my Mac for surfing the internet, building and maintaining my websites, word processing, desktop publishing, photographic and video manipulation, music creation, etc etc etc. Everything I do is done on Mac native software ... SUPERIOR Mac native software.
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