[X4U] New Pentium Macs (Altivec)

[Vard Nelson]

> . . .PowerPC could no longer
> compete, regardless of broken promises from Motorola and IBM.
> Things like the Velocity Engine (i.e. AltiVec) were stopgaps.

We do serious number-crunching on the G5s (many jobs run for days).  The 
Altivec engine has made certain kinds of applications SCREAM such that a 
single G5 can cometimes compete with a cluster of dozens of Winboxes, and 
"dozens" is an understatement.  Of course, that has required 
Altivec-specific programming.  We are NOT looking forward to massive 
re-writes of our code.

Oh, well, the price of wanting to be bleeding edge.

Vard Nelson
Detect Geophysical