Ragashingo, on Jul 1 2005, 05:45 PM, said:
You understand wrong. Macs will be running on Intel Pentium processors. The "move" from Motorola to IBM was nothing because both the G3 G4 and G5 all make use of the PPC instruction set. In moving to Intel Apple is moving to the X86 instruction set, the same thing just about every PC out there uses.
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The move referred to is not G4 to G5, it's 68k to PowerPC. They are quite different processors and for many years MacOS shipped with a 68k emulator so old programs, such as maelstrom, could be played. OS X ditched that, hence why it didn't work using classic mode.
Also, Rosetta has nowhere near the overhead of classic. Classic runs MacOS 9 in a virtual machine. Think Java with a whole OS as the overhead. Rosetta translates a single application and still uses the rest of the OS natively, it'll be much faster.