I thought that I read somewhere that emulating a PPC system on a x86 system would be unbearably slow?
The newer x86 processors are x86_64. The x86_64 ISA gains 8 mostly general purpose registers and all 16 registers are now 64 bits. The x86_64 processors 16 registers still can't hold the PPC's 32 registers but it's a lot better situation than the x86. The x86/x86_64 register memory architecture can do some operations, especially in caches/memory faster than the PPC. The x86_64 processors now have huge caches as well. There was probably some truth that x86 emulation of PPC code would be slow at one time but that is probably less true with x86_64 processors today.
