Rosetta Improvements in 10.4.8, Leopard Build 9A303, Vista Release?

Macworld reports that based on their benchmarks, Apple's Rosetta PowerPC emulation technology for Intel Macs has seen up to 30% improvements in the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4.8). Rosetta is the technology that allows Intel Macs to run PowerPC applications (such as Photoshop and Microsoft Office) which have not yet been released as Universal Binaries.

Apple released the Mac OS X 10.4.8 update on September 29th, 2006 and incorporated a number of improvements.

Meanwhile, Apple is continuing work on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and provided developers with a new seed today (Build 9A303). This latest Leopard build provides ongoing performance improvements and bug fixes, but continues to have a long list of known issues.

While Leopard is officially expected to be released in Spring of 2007, there has been some questionable speculation that Apple may be targeting an earlier release. Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) release will certainly draw comparisons with Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista release. According to the BBC, Vista will be available to retail customers on January 30th, 2007, while corporate customers will be able to get the newest version of Windows starting on November 30th, 2006.