Ralph wrote:
I expect Virtual PC (or something equivalent) to become quite impressive when running natively on the new Intel-based machines. I can't predict how far off that is though.
Running natively may not really come to pass. There are serious obstacles to booting XP on the new Macs, and Vista may be difficult as well (see:
this article for a depressing view of things).
The main problem is in the EFI which replaces the old BIOS. Windows XP does not support this (except for Itanium systems I think - no help there). Dell Core Duo machines with EFI also have a compatibility module (CSM) to allow XP to boot. Apple did not include this since it is not needed. The problem with booting an Intel Mac directly into Windows (as in a typical dual boot system) is that the CSM has to load at startup before anything else so that XP can access the file system.
More optimistically there are likely to be commercial emulators developed that may approach native speeds since the hardware is directly compatible. It is possible that the only part that would need to be emulated is the CSM which, from what I understand, should not affect performance too much.
The hopeful side of this is that an emulator (if it is fast enough) is probably the better solution anyway, since it would presumably allow both systems to run simultaneously.
Of course it's still all very vague and uncertain at this point. I'm still hopeful that an acceptable solution becomes available. It would sure make my life easier.
