Start Up Goal: Run Software on Any Chip

The Mercury News reports on a startup with some interesting technology:

In 1995, company founder Alasdair Rawsthorne began working on software to translate binary code on the fly so that it could run speedily on any chip architecture. He teamed with fellow researchers at England's University of Manchester in 2000 to create Transitive.

The solution is described seems to be a software-only solution -- that according to the article only takes about 600k of memory and reaches about 70% of the native speed of the "emulated" processor. The article makes it a point to distinguish from emulation and describes it as "dynamic translation".

Reportedly, the company has found an unnamed "major" customer. Obviously, Apple is mentioned, but the article also notes that Hewlett-Packard has a major need for shifting from one architecture to another over the next few years.