4 ms·

I’m pretty sure Rosetta wasn’t an interpreter, and Intel chips were less than 2x the speed of PowerPC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) https

• monocasa 9y ago
  Their x86 cores were about 5x faster when you accounted for everything. And even though Rosetta was a JIT it ended up running a little slower than the PowerPC chips it was replacing. So to start off with chips that, let's assume are only about 90% of the chips that you're replacing in native code, you're now at least under half the performance of x86 while emulating. And that means half the battery life too.
  • throwaway84742 9y ago
    You’re making the unwarranted assumption that they’ll actually emulate anything. The state of tooling is much better than it was back then, and this time there’s no 32 bit mode to worry about. According to Anandtech report in 2006, btw, the real world difference was far less than 5x. Indeed, Intel chips had substantially worse FP performance back then, something Apple uses quite a bit in their graphics subsystem.