Digital Equipment Corp is contemplating producing a translator that will take the binary code from shrink-wrapped Windows applications and spit out Alpha code. The result is faster than the standard SoftPC-based Windows and MS-DOS emulation, but slower than code specifically compiled for the RISC chip. The company launched a a direct VAX-to-Alpha binary translator last November and has been shipping an R-series-to-Alpha translator for the last three months. Nonetheless it still has qualms about the Intel Corp equivalent according to Richard Sites, the Alpha CPU architect who is demonstrating the technology at Comdex. He is trying to gauge the interest from developers, and also which set of Windows application programming interfaces it makes most sense for the translator to support: the old Win16 standard, or the intermediate Win32s version. Sites’ demonstration takes a simple piece of Mandlebrot-plotting code written for the Intel machine and runs it in variety of ways on the Alpha machine. The times to complete give a rough guide as to what users can expect from heavy computation work:
66MHz 80486: 40 seconds 60MHz Pentium: 26 seconds Source code recompiled for native Alpha, running on an AXP 150: 14 seconds Intel code running in the standard Windows emulation on an AXP 150 (Sites’ best guess – no benchtest run): 80 seconds Intel binary code translated to run on Alpha running on AXP 150: 24 seconds
