[Ken_F2]

From Maccentral's July 3rd article:

Mihocka is confident that he can create a fast PowerPC emulator for X86 processors. "PowerPC and X86 instructions map together fairly nicely," said Mihocka. He is not yet ready to say exactly how the next SoftMac's emulator will work, but said that more details will be available when the company's new product, SoftMac XP, is launched at Macworld New York in July.

Selected news from the company's web site:

EMULATORS PREVIEWS "XP2" POWERPC EMULATION ENGINE AT MACHACK.

This year's MacHack developer's conference official started today at 12:01am and is now in progress! MacHack guest speaker and Emulators founder Darek Mihocka is giving Macintosh developers a peek at the technology behind the new SoftMac XP product line being launched next month at Macworld Expo New York. It's not just a version of SoftMac for Windows XP. It includes an entirely new emulation engine developed over the past 2 years designed to deliver even faster speeds as well as PowerPC emulation to our products.

Part of the new engine's design did appear last year in SoftMac version 8, but three key features - PowerPC support, binary translation, and ROM-less emulation - were put on hold last September and not included in the SoftMac 8 release. Our new SoftMac XP product line will contain these engine pieces, which over the past 9 months have been completely rewritten to work around serious performance problems in Microsoft's Windows Millennium operating system and Intel's Pentium 4 processor.

After two years of work and the rewrite this winter, we are unveiling the new "XP2" emulation engine to Macintosh developers. The "XP2" stands for "cross-platform extendable processor" for reasons which will be explained at MacHack. The engine has been designed to run on the Windows NT kernel (used by Windows 2000 and Windows XP) and takes advantage of tricks to squeeze extra speed out of high memory bandwidth processors such as the Intel Pentium 4, the new AMD Athlon MP, and Intel's most recent Pentium III Tualatin.

The XP2 engine is capable of up to double the 68040 emulation speed compared to our existing SoftMac 2000 and Fusion PC emulators, bringing the speed into "faster than real-time" territory. In other words, whereas SoftMac 2000 and Fusion PC achieved 68030 and 68040 emulation speeds that approached 50% to 70% of the PC's clock speed, the new engine can achieve equivalent 680x0 clock speeds that exceed the PC's clock speed. We've already achieved benchmarks that deliver close to 2000 MHz 68030 and 68040 performance on memory intensive Macintosh applications, thanks to the fast 266 MHz and 400 MHz bus speeds on today's PCs. PowerPC emulation speed is already running in the hundreds of megahertz and is expected to reach 1000 MHz speeds by the end of this year after some additional fine tuning.

Over the past 2 years we have examined a number of possible technologies to use in the XP2 engine, from the use of hardware co-processor cards to traditional software "jitting" techniques, and eventually came upon a combination of techniques which is entirely software based, and which takes advantage of raw bus speed to reduce the amount of runtime computation required (which is a problem with traditional jitting and interpreting techniques).

Darek will be presenting the technical details of this engine over the next 3 days at MacHack. Developers are encouraged to attend the sessions to learn about our new technology as well as to learn how Macintosh software development and testing can actually be easier on a PC than on a real Mac thanks to the in-circuit-emulation debugging and tracing capabilities of the XP2 engine.

The roadmap of retail products which will be using the new XP2 engine, and the pricing and the availability of those products, will be announced to the public next month at Macworld Expo. Additional technical information and specifications about SoftMac XP and the XP2 emulation engine core will be posted to our web site at that time.

If a single 1.2GHz AthlonMP ("Palomino) can really deliver the MacOS 9.1 performance of a G3 500MHz in this still-to-be-optimized emulator, how will this impact Apple?

[ 07-05-2001: Message edited by: Ken_F2 ]

[reader50]

This is advertising territory, which means the truth can be shaded a little. I suspect the reference PPC speed is that of a 601, not a G3 or G4. Note that while they specify the 68K CPU emulated, they are silent on which PPC core is emulated.

A 601 running at 1 GHz would probably be quite slow compared to any currently shipping G3. And the G4 would do much better. Even in OS 9, Apple has steadily been adding Altivec optimizations. They started with the math routines, and I believe they have been adding a few more areas with each update.

At least, one would hope that OS 9 runs very slowly on the emulator. If it did run quickly, Apple would probably modify the Mac OS license agreement to specifically forbid use on a non-Apple-approved emulator. And that would be a pity.

[The Godfather]

I am waiting anxious on what they will present in MWNY. I don't know what they have planned off the top of my head, but the yplan a huge ship party in Seattle in November, for SoftMacXP customers.

Anything that will bring MacOS closer to me, Apple's or not, is a good thing!!!

One word of warning: Darek has mentioned that supporting classic MacOS and OSX are entirely different things. He explains that OSX depends on new features of the newer Macs, while classic MacOS works through very few logic traps in the classic Apple Macintoshes. So OSX emulation is not guaranteed.

[macvillage.net]

When they say they are emulating the PPC, it doesn't matter as far as speed goes which processor they emulate, emulation can't take advantage of AltaVec or anything like that. The advantage of G3 or G4 emulation is that you can run OS X, though it won't be any faster.