IBM Power4 PPC AltiVec

PenguinPPC is reporting that IBM's new vector unit is AltiVec compatible and is called VMX.

No source is reported.

The new processor is reported to be under consideration by Apple.

That it is pretty cool, I hope we see these processors, although I don't see any specific MHz (or GHZ :)) yet, maybe I need to look harder.

Ensign

HELLZ YEAH!!!

this is gearing up to be the best news for us in a long time, I fear with these speculations the new powerMac's will be a bit disapointing, and it won't be befor 2003 that apple will catch up with the pro line.

I for one will not be buying another moto G4 for now...

Should the IBM chip be backward compatible with Altivec it would obviously be a great boost for Apple, but also the fact that Motorola and Apple use different names might help too:

Motorola have Altivec, Apple call it the Velocity Engine. The casual Apple fan who might not be processor-learned might not know Altivec, and if Apple switch chips and STILL have the 'Velocity Engine' on board, who's to know the differnce on paper?

Difference on the desktop is another thing, and I frankly can't wait.

When I finally ditched the Atari and got my first mac I went from a 16bit cpu to a 32bit cpu. It would be great if after the 4 years or so of having my current mac that my new one makes the leap to 64bit!

I can't afford a new mac this year anyway, assuming apple bring these out sometime next year, by the time I've got enough saved for the current entry level I could end up getting something really powerful for my money. I'm looking forward to seeing how these IBM rumours develop.

One thing that's impressed me most about the specs on the IBM chip is this;

The G4 is 4 x superscaler

The IBM chip is 8 x superscaler

This means a maximum of 4 instructions per clock cycle, it manages 2.31 in realword terms so with an 8 x superscaler chip we could be looking at nearly 5 instructions per clock cycle. That would mean apple can return to the days of the G3 and Pentium 2, understating the genuine pentium crushing performance and shaking up intel. from what I remember, when intel performed their own tests on the G3, it showed the powermac is even faster than apple claimed it was :D

This sounds great.

But VMX? Sounds too much like MMX for my liking... :)

Originally posted by Beej
This sounds great.

But VMX? Sounds too much like MMX for my liking... :)

VMX was the original name of Altivec:
Vector Multimedia eXtension

And developed by IBM, by the way...:D

Now maybe all the switch to x86 threads will die off...

Other links on the PenguinPPC site also go into various linux installs onto Powermacs and X-serve. One such link (http://penguinppc.org/) reports:

"Another One Bites the Dust
July 24, 2002

Ben Herrenschmidt has pounded 1U of Apple hardware into submission. The Xserve has booted and run
GNU/Linux!. There are still some kinks to work out, and your favorite distribution's installer may need some tweaks to install (check with them). Support in the kernel source trees is forthcoming. Word is, running in uniprocessor mode GNU/Linux returned data from mysql databases 4 times faster than OSX running in SMP mode. This was with the same datasets, same queries, same mysql version, and same compile options."

The point I am raising is Apple has apparantly not optimized the software yet for maximum speed since a single linux hacker got a recompile to run 4x faster in several days on a particular database call test.

This might indicate how Jagwire :) has achieved such substantial speed increases in several areas and an indication of lots of good things to come as
hundreds of elements of OSX are updated. One wonders if they are doing 64 bit versions at the same time as 32 bit so when a Power4 derivitive comes out they already have OSX64 10.3 (Warp 10) handy.

Rocketman

Flip those bits.