Author: Jay Scott
Date: 15:17:16 09/01/99
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Here's Motorola's web page about AltiVec, which Apple is calling "Velocity Engine". There's a bunch of marketing trash, but if you follow the link called "The Facts", at the bottom you'll see some PDF files with technical information, including the instruction set. http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/AltiVec/index.html AltiVec is a short-vector processor with 32 128-bit registers. Each register can be treated as four 32-bit floats, four 32-bit integers, eight 16-bit integers, or 16 8-bit integers, and the integers can be signed or unsigned for operations where that makes a difference. The instruction set looks pretty rich to me, and there's supposed to be low overhead. Bottom line: This looks excellent for chess programs! The programmer would have to write AltiVec instructions by hand, and to get the best results the chess program's architecture would have to be tailored to the processor. That would be a tremendous amount of work, but I think that somebody who put in that work would get a nice speed payback. Jay
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