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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Hardware News => Topic started by: norm on October 16, 2002, 10:38:17 AM

Title: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: norm on October 16, 2002, 10:38:17 AM

Source: The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/)

IBM's Peter Sandon disclosed technical details for IBM's PowerPC 970 processor in San Jose this morning and confirmed that the processor supports the AltiVec instruction set. In addition to providing a competitive workstation and edge server chip for IBM - which deploys POWER3 in these space and power sensitive designs, the processor is tailor made for high end Apple machines. It's expected to sample in the first half of next year, and appear in production volumes in the second half.

Click here for more (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27621.html).

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: whabang on October 16, 2002, 11:25:43 AM

Aw yeah!

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: Bobsonsirjonny on October 16, 2002, 12:38:27 PM

This could just make X86 or PPC irrelevant :-) So we can get on and not worry about whats under the bonnet :-D

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: DaveP on October 16, 2002, 12:49:01 PM

We already can consider what is under the bonnet
irrelevant.

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: Bobsonsirjonny on October 16, 2002, 01:29:31 PM

True - but it might put a quash to the X86 v PPC arguments, if both processors perform to a similar spec.

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: Alkemyst on October 16, 2002, 01:43:36 PM

even tho its made with the mac in mind, i hope they dont have excusive rights like they did before  with mota

eyetech,mai,Amiga.inc,better try & leverage some :)

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: Hammer on October 16, 2002, 11:22:26 PM

Other issues may arise may involve;
1. PPC's 32 general registers VS AMD's X86-64’s 16 general registers issues.
2. Pricing/power (i.e. bang for bucks) comparisons.
3. Running legacy software.
4. Availability.
5. ...

Binary abstractions techniques (e.g. virtual 68k processors,  MS's dotNET, Tao's VP) may reduce CPU HW dependencies.

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: AmigaMac on October 17, 2002, 01:19:31 AM

Quote

even tho its made with the mac in mind, i hope they dont have excusive rights like they did before with mota

Don't worry, it's not pointed at the Mac only... IBM also wants to leverage a market with PPC and Linux for this chip, so opportunities will be there.  It is up to Amiga Inc. to get the ball rollin!!!

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: DethKnight on October 17, 2002, 06:53:26 AM

Anyone dabble in 64 bit programming?
I'm curious just how much more different/difficult it is to 32 bit.

Title: Re: IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite
Post by: Treke on October 17, 2002, 10:21:12 AM

64 bit programming:

If you want to just run your programs, recompile, the compiller maybe ;) can do a good optimization

re

Treke