RUMOR: Apple engineers working to enhance Rosetta performance
Posted by Lab Rat
On the heels of news that Adobe does not plan to update the majority of their professional applications until sometime next year, an anonymous source (our favorite kind! 🙂 ) claims Apple is focusing a somewhat substantial portion of their attention towards ironing out some bottlenecks in the Rosetta translation software. Key areas include lowering the amount of memory needed by applications running under Rosetta (which can currently be as much as 2 or 3 times that of running native code), tweaking OpenGL performance, and a better distribution of the translating tasks between the 2 cores of the Core Duo (and other Intel) processors. This last point could potentially be of great benefit, as it seems most of Rosetta’s translating tasks are running on one core at a time.
Rumor has it Apple is slightly ahead of schedule in delivering an Intel PowerMac, yet is a bit concerned over releasing a “pro� machine that cannot produce decent numbers when running a non-universal binary Photoshop. While Rosetta translation will never produce numbers close to equaling native Intel code, the goal is to lessen the perceived performance gap so Apple’s professional customers will not second guess an Intel PowerMac purchase 5 months before a universal Adobe apps are released.
According to our source, Rosetta was originally designed as a stop-gap solution, meat to provide decent performance, yet still encourage developers to work hard on releasing their universal binaries. However, now that it appears Apple’s new professional systems will be out long before the corresponding Adobe/Macromedia software, Apple has realized Rosetta may be around for awhile and the code is being revisited.
Adobe’s unflinching “We’ll update our apps when we fell like it� attitude may provide benefits for all Mac users, as increased Rosetta performance may allow for more legacy software and games to run adequately on the new Intel hardware. No word on whether the Rosetta update will be a part of Apple’s upcoming Leopard, or just intended to rollout as a 10.4.x update.