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Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel? IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) researc
by noelwelsh 11mo ago
Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel?
IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one I think could be generally useful. Imagine if, say, your machine's bootup process was optimized for the hardware you actually have. I'm going off decades old memories here, so the details might be incorrect.
- iszomer 11mo agoI remember it being in one of Sony VAIO's product lines called the picturebook, for its small form factor and a swivel webcam.
- em-bee 11mo agohat was the first laptop i owned ;-) as a frequent traveler it was a very useful device.
- iszomer 11mo agoIt was my first sub-notebook, coming from a thinkpad 600e, and though my memory is fuzzy from 20+ years ago, I think I used an atheros wifi pcmcia/cardbus? card with it at some point. It was also awkward some times having to carry their external 3.5" floppy drive too.
- hayley-patton 11mo agoDynamo <https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/BalaDusterwaldBanerjiaPLDI2000.pdf https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/...>?
- drob518 11mo agoIn the early 1990s, HP had a product called “SoftPC” that was used to emulate x86 on PA-RISC. IIRC, however, this was an OEM product written externally. My recollection of how it worked was similar to what is described in the Dynamo paper. I’m wondering if HP bought the technology and whether Dynamo was a later iteration of it? Essentially, it was a tracing JIT. Regardless, all these ideas ended up morphing into Rosetta (versions 1 and 2), though as I understand it, Rosetta also uses a couple hardware hooks to speed up some cases that would be slow if just performed in software.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoThat wasn’t an HP product. It was written by Insignia Solutions and ran on multiple platforms. I had it on my Mac LCII in 1992. It barely ran well enough to run older DOS IDEs for college. Later I bought an accelerator (40Mhz 68030) and it ran better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC
- hn_acc1 11mo agoIIRC, I had that on my Atari ST as well, and it very slowly booted Dos 3.3 and a few basic programs.. enough for me to use turbo-C or Watcom C to compile a basic .c program to display a .pcx file.
- drob518 11mo agoRight, Insignia. That was it. But it was a product that HP resold in some fashion.
- miohtama 11mo agoApple Arm CPUs have some special tricks to make x86 sogtware emulation faster. https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/ https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-f...
- trollied 11mo agoNo, you are confusing Transmeta with Transitive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit
- nostrademons 11mo agoA lot ended up in HotSpot for the JVM. I know a number of extremely good engineers whose career path went TransMeta -> Sun -> Google.