IBM confirms Altivecked POWER4-lite

[norm]

Source: The Register

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.

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[whabang]

Aw yeah!

[Bobsonsirjonny]

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

[DaveP]

We already can consider what is under the bonnet
irrelevant.

[Bobsonsirjonny]

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

[Alkemyst]

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

[Hammer]

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.

[AmigaMac]

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!!!

[DethKnight]

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

[Treke]

64 bit programming:

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

re

Treke