Alpha emulator on the 8086 ?

From: JF Mezei (jfmezei.spamnot_at_teksavvy.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 15:23:47 -0500

Lets take the theoretical scenario where IA64 is end of life'd.

Could an IA64 emulator be viable on the 8086 ? Consider the EPIC nature of
IA64 and the explicit stuff inclded in all executables, would an emulator
based on the 8086 (or Power for that matter) still be able to cope and provide
good performance ?

Since both PaRisc and Alpha are still more popular and still with far more
software than IA64, it would therefore make sense to develop emulators for
PaRisc and Alpha.

Would an alpha emulator on the 64 bit 8086 provide roughly the same
performance ratio as does the charron-vax on 32 bit 8086 ?

Or is there greater affinity between Alpha and the 8086 (for instance, IEEE
floating point) that an emulator would give a greater percentage of the raw
8086 power ?

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