With Mac OS X having gone “gold master” and being prepped for production, there have been reports that the Classic environment is very slow. However, other sources have told MacCentral that it will be much zippier than reports have indicated.
“Actually, the 9.1 that will ship with OS X will most likely run a bit faster than a standard 9.1,” one developer, who requested anonymity, told MacCentral. “See, the Classic environment is not, literally speaking, an emulation environment in the same sense as Virtual PC. In VPC and other emulators, instructions intended for one kind of CPU are translated to work on another. Classic was made to run on a PPC and it still does.”
He said to think of Classic as only having to do SOME of the jobs that a 9.1-only machine currently has to do. Therefore, it makes sense that this would be faster, he said.
“A lot of the memory overhead will not be needed, the CPU will treat Classic like another application when it comes to memory management and so it actually does a lot less,” the source said. “Anyway, the Classic I have running under a non-public build of OS X is faster than my 9.1 running on the other partition.”