Parallels 'Coherency' Mode

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    Windows XP app running in its own window on the Mac desktop.

    Thanks to DF reader Michael Ströck.

    walt, jesse endahl, scottpartee, mdshivers, and 10 other people added this photo to their favorites.

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    1. kick52 79 months ago | reply

      i wonder how they actualy do it...

      im not very knowledgable on the topic of emulators...

      maybe it uses a wine type thing?

    2. ch0ng 79 months ago | reply

      As far as I know, parallels takes advantage of the built in virtualization hardware in the new Intel Core cpu's. It doesn't have anything to do with emulation whatsoever. Emulation would be like the example someone else posted above where you used to be able to get something like virtual pc to run windows inside of its own self contained environment. The virtual pc software sat as middleware between the powerpc hardware and the windows os (which doesn't run on powerpc). The job of the emulator (virtual pc) was to essentially translate the language of the machine code that windows was written in to the language of the machine code that powerpc hardware understood. This is generally what we refer to as emulation.

      WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" it doesn't do the translation from one CPU's language to another. WINE is an open source implementation of the Win32 API which is what you need to run Windows Software on Windows. Windows itself provides this API and a lot of programs use it. The WINE project allows you to run (some of) those applications on different Operating Systems (ie linux) that run on the same types of computers that Windows runs on.

      Parallels is virtualization software. Basically it uses a virtual CPU to run your non-native (Windows) applications inside of a virtual os (Windows) on your mac. Virtualization is not a new concept. The fine folks over at VMWare have been actively developing a product for years that does exactly this. What is interesting about Parallels (and I suspect new versions of VMWare) is that we now have hardware support for this. Like I said, Parallels leverages the built in virtualization support in modern Intel CPU's this allows for some applications to run almost as fast as they would be if windows was running on your mac rather than MacOS. The big benefit as stated in other posts is that there is no need to reboot.

      In short, there are 3 different methods to doing things. There is Emulation; use this when you need to run an application that runs on a different computing architecture (eg intel vs powerpc). There are projects like WINE that reimplement APIs of other Operating Systems; many times this is "faster" than running the application in a virtual environment. Then there are projects like Parallels which create and use virtual machines to run your non native software in. Virtualization is nothing new, but the hardware support for it now makes it much more viable. Think of this hardware support as a virtualization accelerator. For years people have been buying Graphics Accelerators to improve performance of various display functions (like rendering the latest games in 3d).

      Good work Parallels on the new accomplishments. My friends with Intel Based Macs swear by your software.

    3. haagenjerrys 78 months ago | reply

      ewww noooo the horror

    4. pixelant 77 months ago | reply

      cool

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