[X4U] Re: New Pentium Macs (Altivec)

[Michael J. Prevost]

>  > . . .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


Vard,

I'm glad you posted this message because I've been wondering about 
applications optimized to use Altivec. Does the Altivec silicon do 
anything more than accelerate the floating point performance?

The SPECmark performance for FP that Apple is reporting is much 
better than the Altivec-equipped G5. So if this line of thinking is 
correct, will it be necessary for your team need to write a lot of 
low-level code for the Intel Core Duo? or just use a top-shelf 
optimizing compiler to take advantage of the chip's basic 
architecture?

Mike
Dot4, Inc.