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
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