AltiVec Unwrapped

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."

Comments

Good

[morbid]

This is a good article giving a basic overview of SIMD coding using altivec. However, when Apple claims that MHz don't matter, they're only telling the story, because SSE (on PIII and Athlon4/XP), 3DNow! on K6-2, K6-3 and Athlon all do much the same thing. I hate to say it, but the Pentium IV even has double-precision SIMD in the form of SSE2, currently the only consumer-grade processor with souble-precision SIMD. The AMD Hammer will have SSE2 as well when it comes out.

Re:OpenApple

[JohnsonJohnson]

google is your friend.

Check out the Ars Technica article

[plsuh]

Ars Technica did an article comparing the AltiVec and SSE/MMX2/3DNow! architectures. Written a while back, but still valid as the architectures have not changed.

--Paul