[Info-vax] Attn VSI employees: Viable full system Itanium emulator for VMS ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-17, abrsvc <dansabrservices at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Given the general overhead of any emulation product, I don't see any emulation effort viable for Itanium.  The speeds of the Itanium hardware is such that any potential emulator would not be able to provide comparable performance levels.  With the X86 port not too far out, I would believe that the x86 target is a better option.  I expect that the existing Itanium hardware will last until then.
>

The product in question uses dynamic binary translation instead of the
traditional emulation setup, so it's probably not as big an overhead
as you might think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_translation#Dynamic_binary_translation

However, I do agree that the impact would have been greater if it had
been offered starting at least a couple of years ago (if it turns out
to be a viable product for VMS).

Given how many times the x86-64 schedule has slipped, people will be
wondering if it's going to slip again, and this would be something
tangible they could have worked with in the mean time that could
solve an immediate problem and help keep them as future VSI customers.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.