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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/17/22 14:48, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.
> 

And if they start working on yet another alternative the feeling
may be that there is going to be even more slippage and that might
not be a good idea either.

bill