>The only time 68K code ran faster is when it made heavy use of the Mac APIS that were native.

Yes, and that just confirms the original point. Mac apps often spend a lot of time in the OS apis and therefore the 68K code (the app) often ran faster on PPC than it did on 68K because apps often spend much of their time in OS apis. The earlier post said "so good that for some things the PPC Mac was the fastest 68k mac." That is true.

In my own experience, I found most 68K apps felt as fast or faster. Your app mix might have been different, but many folks found the PPC faster.

Part of that was the greater clock speeds on the 601 and 603, though. Those started at 60MHz. Clock for clock 68K apps were generally poorer on PowerPC until PPC clock speeds made them competitive, and then the dynamic recompiling emulator knocked it out of the park.

Similarly, Rosetta was clock-for-clock worse than Power Macs at running Power Mac applications. The last generation G5s would routinely surpass Mac Pros of similar or even slightly greater clocks. On native apps, though, it was no contest, and by the next generation the sheer processor oomph put the problem completely away.

Rosetta 2 is notable in that it is so far Apple's only processor transition where the new architecture was unambiguously faster than the old one on the old one's own turf.

The first gen 68K emulator performed worse on the PPC 603 than the 601.

That's not true for the 6100 but for the 8100 it was totally true. And at some point my 8500 ran 68k faster than any 68040 ever made, which isn't really fair since the 8500 was rocking good.