PowerPC 970 Redux: Dialogue and Addendum

Arstechnica posted more details on the PowerPC 970 after having had the opportunity to chat with two IBM engineers behind the PowerPC 970.

The interview was aimed primarily at filling any lingering gaps in my previous 970 coverage, i.e. corrections, clarifications, and answering some of the questions raised by the articles. So to that end, we talked mostly about the 970's microarchitecture and specifically about the 970's VMX (a.k.a. Altivec) unit, which turns out to be a lot more flexible and robust than what I'd initially described in my articles.

While forward-looking topics were generally excluded from the interview, the article reveals more technical details regarding the PowerPC 970.