Altivec - how much faster is it?

[strobe]

@minator,

Even with the new PPC 970 quad-pumped bus architecture AltiVec is still starved for data.

[Tigger]

strobe wrote:
Tigger, that's not correct at all. Ignore whomever gave you this misinformation from now on.

Ok, so Apple, IBM & Motorola lie in their public statements, and I should trust your source instead??

There was at no point a restriction made on IBM to produce slow CPUs, that's just 100% rumor bullshit. Motorola doesn't 'own' the instructions, only their implementation which they called AltiVec (which was originally called VMX and after Velocity Engine).

Thats completely untrue, IBM can only make G4's to make up shortcomings of Motorola per month, and cannot sell G4 class processors faster or cheaper then Motorola.   IBM can sell thier G3's at whatever speed and price they want,but thay cannot sell G4s in the same way.  Thats why the 970 is coming out, by reengineering Altivec, they no longer have to follow these rules.  

BTW Apple going AMD is another 100% bullshit rumor.
Stop reading rumors, I mean really.

Its a rumor thats going to be mentioned in two major magazines in April, it may not be true, but the Opteron rumor is big enough to be major story come April, so lets not act like I made it up.
         -Tig

[JetRacer]

Let's ignore rumors and corporate statements.

Fact is that the G3 have a 133MHz bus, the G4 a 166MHz bus.

[Tigger]

JetRacer wrote:
Let's ignore rumors and corporate statements.

Fact is that the G3 have a 133MHz bus, the G4 a 166MHz bus.

I think at the 400 Mhz rating I was comparing them at, they have the same bus speed.   Again I picked as close as I could to give a real delta.   Since Lightwave does not run without Altivec on a G4, I had to do what I did.    The 15% delta is pretty small (actually smaller then I thought we'd see), but is for a real world application and repeatable, so its much better info then the guess work we've seen elsewhere on this thread.  
    -Tig