Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: G4 & AltiVec

Author: Will Singleton

Date: 17:03:52 10/04/99



I'm looking at the specs for the 500mhz G4 (available someday), and I'm
wondering about a couple things.

The AltiVec, or "Velocity Engine", is apparently a vector processing unit for
which special code must be written to obtain speedups.  I wonder if this means
that the compiler must support those instructions, or can you take advantage of
vector processing just by rewriting existing code?

Is the vector-processor used mainly in FP operations, or can it be helpful for
integer-based code?

The specs say that it has data stream prefetching ops supporting 4 simultaneous
32-bit data streams, as well as a new fpu supporting single-cycle,
double-precision calcs.  Are both of these associated with the vector processing
unit?

In short, can a chess program take advantage of vector processing without a
massive rewrite?

Will



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.