After that time, however, there was no new release until July 2011 - five and a half years later. Until December 2005 PearPC advanced quickly in speed, stability and features. However, according to the man pages supplied with Debian's packages of PearPC, even the JIT core runs around 40 times slower than the host machine would if executing native code. Despite running only on x86 host architectures, the JIT emulation core runs at least 10 times as fast as the architecture-independent generic processor emulation core. The emulator features a just-in-time (JIT) processor emulation core which dynamically translates PPC code into x86 code, caching the results. The first official release was made on May 10, 2004. It can be executed on Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other systems based on POSIX- X11.

It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including pre-Intel versions of Mac OS X, Darwin and Linux.