[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 09:46:19AM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> My understanding is that the ONLY reason it failed to come to market is
> that it had no support for legacy x86 software.  (Though surely with
> that much power to play with, an x86 emulator could have been written
> that would run x86 software.  The i860 could quite probably have
> emulated an i486 faster than a real i486.)

That's the difference between Microsoft and Apple. Faced in 1993-1994
with a tough decision on what to do with legacy software, Apple included
an automatic 68020 emulator in the PPC version of MacOS. It worked so
well that the emulated software ran faster on a 66mHz PPC chip 
than a 40mHz 68040.


Microsoft never got into any emulation software until they decided to
use the PPC chips in their X-BOX 360. They bought a company that made
a PC emulator for the Macintosh so that it could be modified to run
older X-BOX software.


Now there are several PC emulators. QEMU is so good that last summer
when I was working an operating system upgrade for the ill fated X86
handheld, I did all of my development and except for the final
testing under QEMU.


Geoff.



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