News - Intel claims it will shrink process every year in bid to beat ARM

[chrestomanci]

Lets say we move from x86(etc) to arm.

What speed of legacy emulation would be required to run 99% of apps?

A 1ghz pentium-M is more than enough for most people, so how/when do we get that kind of emulation speed?

That would depend on how clever the emulator is.

Back in the mid to late 1990's Apple Mac users could use Soft PC (Later Soft Windows) on their PowerPC based Macs to run x86 based applications. Typical performance was comparable or even better than equivalent clocked x86 systems, so a 50 MHz PowerPC based Mac could get similar performance under Soft windows to a 50 MHz Pentium box. For a time the fastest possible performance for some games such as Doom was under Soft PC emulation on a Mac rather than native.

The reason for the high performance was that SoftPC contained a compiler that would analyse a block of x86 instructions for a function, and treat them as source code to compile into PowerPC instructions. This yielded much better performance than a simple translation of instructions one at a time, at the expense of a much more complex emulator.

SoftPC was produced by Insignia (a British Company), The product was sold in 1999 to Connectix, who in turn was brought up by Microsoft in 2003. In other words, If Microsoft wanted to, they have the source to a very capable x86 emulator for RISC processors, and all the patents.

[Terbinator]

Wow, funny how thats worked out for Microsoft.