PearPC made the tv
Adam Johnson was kind enough to pass this guys blog entry on, which gives the details on how to get Mac OSX running on x86 hardware via PearPC. The guy demoed it on ScreenSavers tonight.
I've looked at PearPC a bit when the news hit, but at the moment it's not going to be of interest to most except for the geek-out factor. It's extremely slow at the moment, and rough around the edges, but apparently with a very, very fast CPU its somewhat usable (dual CPUS seem to make a big difference). If you've ever used the BOCHS emulator for PPC, think that slow, minus a couple of orders of magnitude.
This comment in particular made me laugh, as iTunes for Mac OSX isn't exactly a speed demon:
- It's slow, very very slow – as in 286 SX slow, as in iTunes for Windows slow... you get the idea.
My understanding of what's causing PearPC to get kicked in the nuts regarding speed are two-fold:
- x86's lack of registers
- Lack of a real JIT implementation
The latter can be rectified and is something they're working on, and it'll give a big boost. The former isn't going to go away anytime soon. To get an idea, a CPUs registers are sort of like the CPUs RAM. x86 has always been severely limited in this area, and the PPC has way more registers than any of the x86 architecture. What happens when you're low on RAM?
Your computer has to page out memory to the hard drive, which slows everything down. Pretty butchered analogy, but it gets the point across: the PPC was very well suited to emulating the x86 arch, but x86 is extremely ill-suited to emulating the PowerPC arch.
It'd be kinda cool to see some numbers run on this... expected performance with a JIT compiler, possible optimizations, and what x86 speed you'd need to get the same performance of say, a 500 MHz G3.
Either way, if you're curious, it's worth checking out. At the very least you have to be impressed by the work these guys are putting in. There's a good forum conversation going on here (long) that I wish I had time to really go through at the moment, but I saw some amusing screenshots.
Posted by drunkenbatmanMay 12, 2004, at 11:37 PM
