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[Altaire4_2dot0]

MacIntel: Rosetta is faster than a G4

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:07 EST
The fellow over at Nakfull Propaganda got hold of an iMac Core Duo 1.83GHz last week and ran some loose benchmarks on the unit as compared to a Power Mac dual G5 2.5GHz and a PowerBook G4 1.67GHz. While the specifics can be seen in the original posting, the nice take-away is that apps running under Rosetta, Apple's PowerPC emulation layer that's part of Mac OS X for Intel, are generally faster than they are when running native on a G4.

This is happy news, indeed, as much will need to run under Rosetta here at the beginning of the Intel transition. Originally, many were concerned about Rosetta's potential performance, given that it started out as a G3 emulator that ignored the G4/G5's AltiVec instruction set. The release of Mac OS X v10.4.3, however, brought a much improved Rosetta, offering full G4 emulation, including AltiVec.

http://www.maconintel.com/news.php?article=112

-Alt