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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)
180 points onename | 4 comments | 12 Nov 25 09:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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noelwelsh ◴[12 Nov 25 10:46 UTC] No.45898610[source]▶
Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel?

IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one I think could be generally useful. Imagine if, say, your machine's bootup process was optimized for the hardware you actually have. I'm going off decades old memories here, so the details might be incorrect.

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1. hayley-patton ◴[12 Nov 25 11:39 UTC] No.45898932[source]▶
Dynamo <https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/...>?
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2. drob518 ◴[12 Nov 25 11:56 UTC] No.45899068[source]▶
In the early 1990s, HP had a product called “SoftPC” that was used to emulate x86 on PA-RISC. IIRC, however, this was an OEM product written externally. My recollection of how it worked was similar to what is described in the Dynamo paper. I’m wondering if HP bought the technology and whether Dynamo was a later iteration of it? Essentially, it was a tracing JIT. Regardless, all these ideas ended up morphing into Rosetta (versions 1 and 2), though as I understand it, Rosetta also uses a couple hardware hooks to speed up some cases that would be slow if just performed in software.
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3. raw_anon_1111 ◴[12 Nov 25 15:23 UTC] No.45901321[source]▶
That wasn’t an HP product. It was written by Insignia Solutions and ran on multiple platforms.

I had it on my Mac LCII in 1992. It barely ran well enough to run older DOS IDEs for college. Later I bought an accelerator (40Mhz 68030) and it ran better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC

4. miohtama ◴[12 Nov 25 16:21 UTC] No.45902039[source]▶
Apple Arm CPUs have some special tricks to make x86 sogtware emulation faster.

https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-f...