View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/06/08/rosetta.technology.for.ia/ Wednesday, Jun 08, 2005 9:35am Transitive delivers Rosetta technology to Apple Transitive Technologies is providing Apple with software translation technology that allows old Macintosh software programs to run on Intel-based Macs, according to The Mecury News. The technology, announced as Rosetta at Steve Jobs' WWDC Keynote, will allow Mac OS X applications created for the PowerPC to run on Intel-based Macs, which will be "important for Apple to hang onto its loyal Macintosh customers at a time when it is making a major switch to new hardware." Rosetta consists of three parts: a decoder, which takes the code of the older software and converts it into an intermediate format; the core processing engine, which takes the intermediate format and figures out how fast it can run the older software in its new form; and conversion to a custom-tailored version that runs on the target computer. The article says that translation consumes about 25 percent more memory and runs at roughly 70-80 percent of the speed at which it ran on the original computer.