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Released in 1996, FX!32 was developed by Digital to support their Alpha processors. At the time, there was a belief that RISC processors such as Alpha, were likely to replace x86 Intel based processors, due to a more efficient and simplified architecture, that could reach higher clock speeds. The one thing that held Alpha back, was application compatibility with existing Windows applications.
Emulation has been around for a while as a concept, but FX!32 went one stage further, analysed the way programs worked, and in real time, developed dll files of native Alpha code, the application could call upon next time it ran. This way even in the 1.0 release, FX!32 achieved speeds with Windows applications of 40-50% native, with 70% projected as likely with improved optimzation.
FX!32 was a remarkable piece of clever coding, that had Intel not found a way to emulate an x86 processor, and move internal computation to a move RISC like architecture, might very well have be come the normal way to run legacy Windows applications, as the world migrated to the Alpha chip architecture.
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