PPC 970: Apple, Thendic, Eyetech

[blubbe]

@minion
Well with PPC it has. As there are no special
address-registers, but just general purpose
registers. You use the ALU to compute
adrresses with theese regs, in this case
64 bit regs. So its 64bit integer math/logic/addressing. The FPU is already 64bit
in the 32bit PowerPCs. And the Altivec is 128bit.
The differences should be zero, compared to
32bit cpus. Unless you do math on 64 bit integers.

@all

And when we are at Altivec:
Altivec is vector processing.
Theese vectors (always 128bit,16bytes)
may containg either 8bit/16bit/32bit integer or 32bit float values.  You can fit 4 32bit values in one vector.

People seem to think its just about floats regarding
Altivec, but it handles integers just as well.
Altivec adds 160+ new instructions to the original instructionset of 220+.

[blubbe]

You missed my point. Ignoring the 64/32 Bit thing the PPC970 should be a lot faster than a G4 for example because the CPU itself is a lot faster, 64 or 32 bit. I.e. if it wasn't 64 bit capable, then then it would still be faster then other PPC CPU's (baring in mind it will run at 1.8 GHz and is a lot "wider"( not in terms of bits, but execution units etc) than say a G3 or G4. i.e. clock for clock it is faster and as an added bonus it runs faster.

I hear you, and I agree. It will be faster, but not
much because its 64bit. The new memory-interface
sounds quite interesting, and should boost performance alot too.