The deal, despite being non-exclusive, is being presented as a booster for the Itanium community and as an attempt by Intel to fight back against rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in the high-end computer and server markets. Intel’s next step could be to use Transitive technology to take communications software—frequently written and compiled for RISC processors such as PowerPC and MIPS—and let it run transparently on Intel processors. Ultimately, it could start designing processors to assist the Transitive software.

Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Transitive (Los Gatos, Calif.) are focusing initial work on developing QuickTransit hardware virtualization products for Itanium and Xeon processors for market release this year, the companies said.

Transitive’s technology is powerful because, by performing appropriate transformations on the fly, it enables applications to run transparently across multiple processor and operating system pairs without any source code or binary changes.

The company was founded in 2000 as a University of Manchester spin-off by Alisdair Rawsthorne, who serves as chief technology officer. It has developed a retargetable, dynamic binary translator, providing compatibility between pairs of different processor instruction sets. Typically QuickTransit achieves 80 percent of the performance of native code, although in some circumstances the translated code can run faster than the native code, the company has found. And the development marked the theoretical end of the microprocessor dependence that had hallmarked the electronics industry in the 1980s and 1990s.

Transitive is best known for the PowerPC-to-x86 QuickTransit software that forms the basis of Rosetta from Apple Computer. This software is included in Core Duo iMacs based in Intel processors and allows the iMacs to run legacy code written for Apple computers based on the PowerPC processor architecture. Transitive has also worked with Silicon Graphics Inc., to enable a similar processor transition.

In the latest deal, Intel has agreed to provide funding and access to engineering resources to ease the development and testing of QuickTransit software for Xeon and Itanium processors. Intel has also agreed to work with Transitive to market the QuickTransit technology to computer makers, software vendors and the rest of the IT supply chain, Transitive said.