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There's little need. The Altivec advantage has been shrinking pretty steadily for a while now and I doubt Intel would redesign a chip for certain optimisations that it can achieve in other ways.

Often, when I read these types of articles, it seems to me the authors are still (unconsciously) referencing the G4's from the late 90's, and don't seem to aknowledge other advancements by other chip makers that have closed, and often eliminated, the performance gap, Altivec notwithstanding. Remember the Photoshop comparison I posted between a G4 1.33 and a Celron 1.3?  That performance leap tillustrates the reality of stagnant Altivec development vs Intel's Banias and subsequent technologies.

Apple's guidelines for moving to x86 include a chapter on this subject:

http://developer.apple.com/documentatio … al_binary/

It's about equivalent SSE commands to Altivec. I think we can say that infers no Altivec.

I'm sorry, but that article was grade A retarded. That guy's an idiot. He's clearly not a developer, he does not understand hardware at all, and he has absolutely no idea what the hell he's talking about.  For christ sake, he's still talking about MMX. That article's not even worth talking about. We might as well talk about why babies should fly like birds.

And on a side note. SSE3 is a nice SIMD and, overall, we'll will probably see better application performance out of it. Many people claim that Altivec is slightly superior, but squeezing Altivec for performance is more of a pain in the ass then SSE3.

Last edited by Aqua OS X (2005-06-24 11:23 pm)

dumasses

I really can't wait to see benchmarks against intel Mac's and G5 Macs running FCP, DP, Logic, and Photoshop.  I really don't believe intel's SIMD is better then Altivec.  And they have 4 of them to work with.  MMX, SSE, 2 and 3.  I'm still gonna stick with my plan of not buying a Intel Mac until I get a dual core dual CPU HT 64BIT Xeon box.

Last edited by dj phat 2000 (2005-06-25 1:23 am)

dj phat 2000 wrote:

I really can't wait to see benchmarks against intel Mac's and G5 Macs running FCP, DP, Logic, and Photoshop.  I really don't believe intel's SIMD is better then Altivec.  And they have 4 of them to work with.  MMX, SSE, 2 and 3.  I'm still gonna stick with my plan of not buying a Intel Mac until I get a dual core dual CPU HT 64BIT Xeon box.

I think this is the reason they will be transitioning the pro macs last.  So much code in those Apps has to be be optimized for Altivec and PPC in general that getting the same performance out of an Intel version is probably going to take some time.

No. They won't.

And I thought Ribtorus' psbench post was a G4 vs. a Celeron M, which would have a 400 MHz FSB and overall performace comparable to a 2 Ghz Pentium 4.

And because it kicks major ass.

dj phat 2000 wrote:

I really can't wait to see benchmarks against intel Mac's and G5 Macs running FCP, DP, Logic, and Photoshop.  I really don't believe intel's SIMD is better then Altivec.  And they have 4 of them to work with.  MMX, SSE, 2 and 3.  I'm still gonna stick with my plan of not buying a Intel Mac until I get a dual core dual CPU HT 64BIT Xeon box.

The Mactels will kick the G5's scrawny little ass.  Intel compiler + Xcode == FAST.  But even if the G5 is a better chip, it certainly doesn't show it in the real world, and it won't show it in the future either.

Superman wrote:

dumasses

I find this post to be quite ironic.