Red Hat To Support PowerPC, AltiVec

Steve Cowan writes "According to an article at MacCentral, Red Hat has announced that they will produce a GNUPro toolchain and cross compiler for AltiVec-enabled PowerPC processors (such as that found in the Power Mac G4). It will be interesting to see just what kind of performance gains this will bring, because many believe that the full potential of AltiVec is far from tapped."

Comments

this is Cygnus, not Linux news

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is about a release of GNUPro tools that support Altivec, not optimizing the linux kernel to use Altivec.

As to the question of "what will this bring since altivec is underused/underappreciated?" the answer is simple: nothing.

The same problem remains: if you want to optimize your algorithm using Altivec, you still have to jump through some hoops. GCC isn't magically going to detect that your for loop could be done 400 times faster using Altivec: you'll need to tell it.

In short, you can do everything you need to already using the existing tools from here.

Just-another-tool does not news make.

Re:Time to convert all those Mac users ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat's GNUPro (the old cygnus stuff) is what's being touted ... that'd be the compiler and tool chain.

This is not a new redhat Linux distro.

Huh?

[Jeffrey Baker]

I doubt this will produce any performance gains at all. Code will still need to be written specifically for the AltiVec unit, using either the C extensions or assembler. A simple recompile will not bring any gains, unless RedHat are able to improve GCC's PPC code generation.

BTW, GCC and binutils already support the AltiVec, including the C extensions.

Re:RedHat on new Macs?

[chainsaw1]

Motorola and IBM parted ways at the G4. The Power4 doesn't include AltiVec....IBM wanted to use the on-chip real estate for other things.

Also, the Power4 is a 64bit chip, and the G4 is still 32bit.