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Inside the PowerPC 970

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the take-a-closer-look dept.

daveschroeder writes "Jon "Hannibal" Stokes has posted a long-awaited, very detailed analysis of the IBM PowerPC 970 at Ars Technica. Notable quote: 'The 970 was made for Apple'."

1 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:nope. by jovlinger · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    ya.

    But there's like three people in the world who actually use altivec. Hardly optimizing for the common case... (that said, I do run mplayer which I think relies on similar SIMD instructions on the x86 to provide realtime img post-processing).

    Wouldn't it be cheaper for all concerned for apple to seriously subsidize a PCI photoshop accelerator (basically a card full of DSPs and RAM with a wide bus)?

    I'm thinking back to the days when I would read BYTE and to drool over this black (really cool, in those days) 486/Pentium box filled to the brim with i960 cards. By a company called... erm.. Microway? With their compiler, it could reach a peak of 1 gigaflop. Back in the early ninety's. Do some reverse Moore's law extrapolation to see how impressive those numbers were.

    Now if you're going to cater to heavy number crunching, it seems that's the way to go. Just admit that the CPU is there to deal with the UI, and let the DSPs do the effects.

    Has anyone used one of those machines?