Transitive Corporation, the leading provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, today announced that founder and Chief Technical Officer Alasdair Rawsthorne has been named an InfoWorld Innovator for 2005. The annual InfoWorld awards recognize individuals whose vision and expertise drive the future of enterprise technology. InfoWorld, a leading provider of technology information, announced the recipients of its 2005 Innovators Awards in the August 1st, 2005 edition of InfoWorld magazine. The article can be found online at http://www.infoworld.com/reports/31SRinnovators2005.html
“Transitive is grateful for this prestigious recognition by InfoWorld,” said Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO of Transitive in a release. “The award signifies that both our innovative technology and business model are well-aligned with a genuine market need for a new class of technology to drive transitions in the computing market.”
“By abandoning business as usual, these honorees are striking new paths to efficiency and reliability across the board …” said Richard Gincel, InfoWorld associate editor. “In turn, we are pleased to honor those who are leading the way with their ingenuity.”
According to the InfoWorld article on Rawsthorne, “Now his biggest challenge is convincing skeptical customers the technology really works: ‘Everyone’s first reaction is that it’s clearly too good to be true.’
“One true believer is Steve Jobs, who plans to use Transitive technology to run existing Mac apps on Intel CPUs. Rawsthorne foresees QuickTransit running on cell phones, PDAs, or any other hardware that evolves more rapidly than the apps that run on them.”
Transitive’s software technology allows other application software that has been compiled for one processor/operating system to be run on another processor/operating system without any source code or binary changes. Transitive announced its QuickTransit software product line in 2005 and has confirmed customer engagements including Silicon Graphics and Apple, with more announcements expected this year.
MacDailyNews Take: While impressive, Rosetta is really the backup plan in Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel-based Macs. Apple’s main thrust to developers are “Universal Binaries” or two versions of a program that work natively on PPC or Intel-based Macs. We don’t think many people will ever really use Rosetta very much – if you depend on a piece of software, you’ll update it and get a Universal Binary in the process – but it’s a good backup.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Transitive lies at heart of Apple’s Rosetta translation tech for upcoming Intel-based Apple Macs – June 08, 2005
If Rosetta works as advertised, then this is a deserved award.
If it doesn’t, then boo hiss I’ll have to buy an Intel (eventually), but I’ll still keep my G4 PowerBook cause it is DA BOMB!
Apple Rule, they take Micro$haft back to school.
This is a major step toward processor independence it seems. Pretty soon, you can have your Mac powered by a grapefruit.
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For all the whining and complaining about how this transition is going to kill Apple in the short term, this just emphasises that if this technology doesnt work, then the people who have bought PowerPC based systems recently and before the trasnsition is complete will have a better overall Mac user experience for years to come. It’s not the other way around.
I heard about this technology way back when and thought then that Apple would maybe do something with it cuz it sounded pretty cool. I NEVER imagined it would take the path it did though – i.e. Apple on Intel running PPC apps.
Leave it so Apple to lead the way in adopting good new technolgoy tho.
Why does anybody doubt that this kind of technology will work?
We had something similar on the Mac when PowerPC came around. There were still chunks of Mac OS 9 running in 68k emulation. Dynamic translation is much like a JIT compiler vs a Java interpreter.
Yeah, but you need at least 512MB of RAM and a FireWire port on your grapefruit in order for it to run OSX!!
Rosetta works differently than many other instruction set emulators like the 68K->PPC emulator. It translates one CPU instructions into a middle language (a “Rosetta language” if you like), which is then translated into the host CPU instructions.
This makes it a lot easier to add support for new CPU instruction sets.
The instructions are cached too so performance improves as less and less of the original code remains.
MDN is naive if they really think Rosetta won’t be important. Many Mac users rely on apps that get updated much less frequently than Safari, iLife, Microsoft Office, etc. I’m sure that some of the OS X apps I use will never be updated again, because the developer has stopped working on them. If Rosetta combined with a faster processor keeps me from ever fretting about this, it’s definitely a good thing. Without it, I simply wouldn’t buy an Intel-based Mac until I absolutely had to.
sminds raises a good point.
I still use Classic apps in 10.4.2 even though OS X has been available for five or six years. The authors of these applications have chosen for whatever reason not to upgrade. Even though the upgrade path to Intel will actually be easier than the OS 9 to OS X upgrade, many developers may not, as sminds notes, see a need to upgrade their products. Hence the need for Rosetta.
In addition, just having Rosetta around gives software buyers confidence that they will not be buying obsolete software now if they move to Intel soon. That has to help in keeping Mac developers happy at Apple trough.