[compsoc-announce] Week 8: Transitive's QuickTransit

[Will Thompson]

Morning, Compsoccers!

We seem to have reached 8th week, which is slightly surprising.  Here at
Compsoc Towers, we have one final talk for you this term, which is...
tomorrow night!

Hardware Virtualization Technology
==================================

Date: Wednesday 29th November
Time: 20:00
Place: Denis Sciama Lecture Theatre, Denys Wilkinson Building

    Martyn Spink and Geraint North will speak about Transitive[0]'s
    QuickTransit®[1] technology, which allows software compiled for one
    processor and operating system to run transparently on a different
    processor and operating system without recompilation or patching.
    The most famous use of this technology is probably Apple's
    Rosetta[2], which allows applications compiled for PowerPC Macs to
    run on the new Intel-based Macs. Martyn and Geraint will show this
    in action as well as demonstrating another use of the technology.

[0] http://www.transitive.com/
[1] http://www.transitive.com/products/
[2] http://www.apple.com/rosetta/

I'm still in a small amount of shock that it's even possible to do this
at a reasonable speed.  (They even manage to use hardware graphics
acceleration on the new platform in some cases!)  The PPC -> Intel
switch seemed to work without any major hiccups for Apple, and tomorrow
we can find out why.  :-)

If you are unsure where the Denys Wilkinson Building is, then
http://tinyurl.com/yeqtzg should help!  

Right, I should stop sitting here deleting all messages with the subject
line "$person wrote:" every five minutes.  I was planning to include
some more abysmal poetry here, but I fear the angry mob congregating
outside my door with pitchforks and vats of boiling oil...

See you tomorrow,

wjt
--
Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President
<http://www.ox.compsoc.net/>