On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 06:08 PM, Jeremy Derr wrote:
not entirely true. while Motorola does indeed own the rights to the Altivec, IBM makes G4s without the Altivec for some of their workstations and servers. They've also provided Altivec enabled G4s to Apple at least once when Moto's yields were horrendously low. IBM has also included the Altivec unit on the G5 - that fact is exactly what started all the rumors around the IBM PPC 970 processor. When they posted the specs for the 970 and it included Altivec, the Rumor Sites went nuts with speculation.
Firstly I was unaware that the G5 even had Altivec. Secondly, as the PPC project is a joint venture between Motorola and IBM it seems logical that IBM at least has rights to produce the G4 pattern, even if they need to seem express permission to use Altivec. Given this it now seems less logical that Apple should want to use the 'Super G3' for their computers as, although it would be at reduced cost, the main reason I sited for using it was to get around the supply of CPUs from Motorola.
FWIW I didn't really just HOW good Altivec was until I ran Illustrator and Photoshop on my iMac. At only 800Mhz I expected it to be slower than my machine at work (an Athlon 1800+ XP) when in actual fact the Altivec engine allows stuff like Gaussian blurs to be carried out faster on a machine of half the clock speed. Impressive!
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