Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AltiVec Unwrapped

Posted by michael on from the bare-bones dept.

paradesign writes "O'Reilly is running a nice article on AltiVec in the G4 chip. The article includes examples, with code, showing its effectiveness. For everyone who is uneducated as to exactly what Altivec is, this is a must read."

2 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Run away! by PhysicsGenius · · Score: 1, Funny
    Hearing about the wonderful performance, my lab picked up a bunchof these babies for our molecular interface simulations. As spec'd they are wonderful, trouble is, you can't use all that power without burning the case off.

    We did a simple run of elastic polymer equilibria (for nitrogen, of course) and the RAM sub-bus gave out on us after registering a temperature of 87 farads. So we backed off to a simple newtonian extrapolation using quadrature-integrated gaussian kinetics and while it worked the results are no more accurate than we sould have gotten from DOS 5 on a 386.

    In short, unless you are planning to run it above the Antarctic circle, don't buy one.

  2. Re:Good by QuietRiot · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was curious about what kind of hardware in the x86 arena had the same capabilities. Does anyone know where one could find a rundown of the "extras" found on the various x86-based processors with capabilities similar to those described above?

    How do they compare to the AltiVec in terms of speed, precision, cache in/out, etc.?

    Oh! http://www.processor-emporium.co.uk seems to be a good reference site....