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Red Hat To Support PowerPC, AltiVec

Posted by Hemos on from the adding-on-the-supports dept.

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."

1 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. It will stay untapped. by Erich · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Parallelism is really, really, really hard to do in a compiler. Intel has a hard time doing it even after spending millions for a compiler on their VLIW architecture. DLP is typically even harder than ILP for a compiler to do.

    Compilers can typically do a pretty good job on sequential machines, but there is still a long way to go for getting good parallel code. Hand coding things is still the way to go for maximum performance.

    That being said, the compiler can probably use it some, and having a resource available is typically better than not having the resource at all.

    --

    -- Erich

    Slashdot reader since 1997