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

Re:The real worth here...

[Arker]

The real worth here lies in the fact that MacOS X is, let's not forget, essentially a UN*X platform.

I don't see what that has to do with anything. We're talking about porting the toolchain to the hardware. This has nothing to do with MacOs 10 at all. It's about Linux/PPC.

Linux/PPC has been hampered for quite awhile by the lack of good GCC support for things like AltiVec. Performance suffers from lack of optimisation. It sounds like RH is undertaking to fix that. This could be very cool - if they succeed then Linux/PPC programs will be able to take advantage of the full power of the PPC chips. AltiVec doesn't help with everything, far from it, but code which it does help will see truly impressive performance gains.

If you're not clear on what AltiVec is, try the link out. Basically it's MMX on steroids. It does everything MMX does, better, and some other things besides. It's really very cool tech, and it will be very nice to see Linux/PPC software finally taking advantage of it.

Probably won't help mac fans.

[Eric Seppanen]

My guess is that they're doing this for embedded applications. Remember that Red Hat does a fair amount of business in the embedded arena, and PowerPC processors are pretty big in embedded applications. So while their work on the compilers will benefit everyone, including people running Linux on their Macs, this doesn't mean you're going to see a PowerPC version of Red Hat Linux any time soon.

It will stay untapped.

[Erich]

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.

Re:Isn't this just rolling back Apple changes?

[devphil]

Uh, no. Not by a long shot.

First, the changes that Apple made to their own version of GCC were not well thought out. Those patches can't simply be applied to the real GCC.

Second, I don't know what "commercial GCC release" you're talking about. The AltiVec patches have been going into the publiv version of GCC for weeks now. Check their mailing list archives for all the gory details.

Re:Good way to make inroads.

[masonbrown]

And maybe, then Adobe will drop Photoshop on Windows, and make everyone use Linux. And maybe then, Microsoft will go out of business. And maybe then, Adobe will open source Photoshop, and make it free for everyone. And maybe then, Apple will give away its computers as free community property.......