![]() ![]() The other side effect to a Rosetta-style binary translation is that the amount of memory that you need goes up, sometimes significantly. You can tell if an application is Universal or not by looking at its info, the Kind: field will be listed as "Application (Universal)". And although the process works, it is primarily to ensure functionality and wreaks havoc on performance. If you're familiar with compilers, this very much sounds like a real time compiler, except that you are going from low level assembly code to low level assembly code instead of a high level programming language to the latter. The code is also cached along the way so that frequently used code blocks run quicker, since they don't have to be re-translated. ![]() ![]() The basic gist of Rosetta is this: when a non-Universal application runs its PowerPC assembly code, it is handed off to Rosetta, which then translates it into another form, optimizes it and then generates its own x86 code. Apple has been extremely quiet about the specifics of Rosetta, in my opinion, because it is a temporary solution that doesn't perform very well and they would rather that everyone forget it exists and port to Universal binaries immediately than rely on it as a crutch. All have been scheduled and committed, but we're still at least another month away from seeing their debut.Īpple has done a tremendous job of making sure that non-Universal binaries do run on their new Intel based Macs, thanks to a binary translation program called Rosetta. The entire Microsoft Office suite, all of Adobe's products, and even Apple's professional application line have yet to be made available as Universal binaries. And although the number of Universal applications is quite large, there are still quite a few that are missing. All of the applications that we've looked at thus far are Universal binaries, meaning that they are compiled to work on both PowerPC and x86 architectures. ![]()
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