Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

15 Sep 2004

 

Special Report: Breakthrough technology to lead way to far more software on Mac OS X - technical and vertical industry applications top candidates for use under 'virtualization'

A silicon valley startup has cracked one of the most elusive goals of the software industry: a near universal operating system emulator which will allow any software written for any particular target platform to run nearly full speed on just about any other platform. This means that a program such as Autocad for x86 (Pentium chips) on Windows can be installed on a Linux box running on IBM's POWER 5. Or that Microsoft ACCESS for Windows on Intel can run at full speed on Mac OS X on PowerPC.

Transitive Corporation

Transitive Corporation has developed QuickTransit™ software that allows applications to run transparently on multiple hardware platforms with absolutely no source code or binary changes to the application. The company made the announcement yesterday that they have four products available:

• QuickTransit for POWER/PowerPC: with support for MIPS, x86, and mainframe
• QuickTransit for Opteron: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC, and mainframe
• QuickTransit for Itanium: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC, x86 and mainframe
• QuickTransit for x86: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC, and mainframe

"The reality is that it's often difficult and expensive to port software applications to hardware platforms," said Bob Wiederhold, President and CEO of Transitive Corporation. "QuickTransit breaks the burdensome history of hardware/software dependency and therefore provides immediate benefits to the computer industry. QuickTransit dramatically reduces the cost, risk and time-to-market to support new or multiple hardware platforms, and it makes significantly more software available on computer platforms."

Such technology could be a boon for the Mac OS X environment allowing many professional folks to run their businesses on Apple's more friendly and virus free computers. While most businesses can find appropriate and first-rate software for the Mac platform, numerous vertical industries operate around de facto industry standard software which is not available on anything other than the Microsoft Windows platforms. Additionally, specialized niche software often runs only on a limited set of Unix platforms. While much of this software has been slowly making its way onto Apple's Unix-based OS X, Windows software has remained a stopping point for many businesses interested in seeing Apple on their corporate desktops. QuickTransit for PowerPC may hold the key for these types of businesses in the near future.

Modular Architecture

QuickTransit works by using a modular approach to its own architecture. "Front end" decoders read (scan) blocks of binary code in the non-native application language (say, x86) and then translates them into an "intermediate representation" (IR). QuickTransit's optimizing kernel then translates the IR code representation and sends it off to a "backend code generator" that encodes the optimized blocks for the target processor (say PowerPC). It also caches these encoded blocks for future reuse.

QuickTransit works on applications written in any language including C, C++, FORTRAN, Cobol, Basic, Ada, Pascal, Modula, PL/1, and assembly language. Computational performance is 80 percent of a native port and interactive window and graphics performance is fully transparent. The user would barely notice it.

QuickTransit runs in only 500KB of memory space. The system resource overhead of the translation process is small.

Currently the company is working with the six largest computer OEMs in the world on shipping their product in the later half of 2004 and early 2005. The company is being extremely tightlipped about who these computer OEMs are.

Architosh Analysis: We were some what fascinated to see that despite the large hoopla apparent in this company's press release, the event got little coverage on the main IT news circuit. Most of the news coverage it did get was from obscure Mac news sites and Xbox oriented news sites. Clearly, with Microsoft's next Xbox being PowerPC-based there is large interest in Xbox owners in this technology as it may enable them to play their x86-based games on future PowerPC-based Xboxes.

Transitive Corporation's technology solution here holds great promise for those platforms who trail behind marketshare leaders with far more software but yet offer compelling and alternative solutions and platforms. The Mac is just one example but clearly in the gaming space one could point to Nintendo as being in danger of losing ISV mindshare and eventually gamers.

On the announcement with the top six computer manufacturers? We would gather that Apple may not be in that list. Instead, we see IBM, Dell, HP -- that's the top three -- Gateway, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Sun as likely candidates to jointly announce Transitive partnerships oriented at the Linux side of the enterprise market. What we see here is a large interest in server OS virtualization as well as Linux on the desktop with varied and common Windows-based applications running on Microsoft-less boxes.

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