- Architosh Staff ([email protected])
- 5 Sep 2002
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Readers contribute info on IBM 64-bit PowerPC & G4/G5 AltiVec | IBM Licensed AltiVec Years Ago Joseph Schneider wrote in to inform us that IBM, at the very least, licensed AltiVec from Motorola years ago when the two companies agreed to work together after a brief PowerPC breakup at their Austin, Texas-based, Design Center. The two companies discussed their mutual PowerPC plans in a Macworld article published in 2000 by Stephen Beale. You can read the article here. | | AltiVec Just A Trademark? However, according to Juan Gomez Martin of Spain, IBM doesn't need to license AltiVec at all: "Concerning your article about IBM's future chip being Altivec compatible, I believe the only thing proprietary about Altivec is the trademark, as the vector unit extensions for PowerPC were named VMX in some roadmap papers before Altivec first appeared, seeming VMX to be an extension of the common PPC architecture developed by the AIM group." We would love it if some reader could help us confirm that fact, as two other readers have mentioned VMX as well in their short notes to us. | | | ArsTechnica Discussion on VMX and AltiVec According to Mr. Gomez, there have been some very smart discussions at Arstechnica.com, in the forums, regarding the AltiVec/VMX matter. We will be reading those in short order. A couple of interesting notes which Mr. Gomez included are: - It is not known if IBM plans to put a full vector unit (in its upcoming 64-bit PowerPC chip) or some sort of MMX-style architecture in which vector processing coopts resources from the rest of the chip (most noticeably the floating-point units)??
- For an Altivec-style unit to be of any advantage beyond simple backwards compatibility, it should do double-precision without workarounds at the very least, or the floating point units of the Power4-derived architecture will more than match its capabilities.
What Mr. Gomez may be referring to in the way of workarounds may be advances made in software to provide higher levels of floating-point precision in the current G4. Refer to this story: Apple discusses Oct-level precision in AltiVec G4 Processor. | |
Apple G5: Smokes Intel Competition Apple, Autodesk and Mac OS X ProSwitcher: Joe Esch: SketchUp, Cocoa and Mac OS X Bill Gates' House Designed on Macintosh? 
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