PSIG 30: Thursday December 2nd, 1999

Again this month I focused on assembly language, except I focused on what Apple calls the "Velocity Engine", but what everyone else calls AltiVec. I stole some poor chap's PDF slides about AltiVec and passed them off as my own, but I must admit I wasn't very convincing.

We went through how AltiVec and DSPs compare, and went over the G4's general architecture. Using the AltiVec emulator on my PowerBook, I showed off a couple of simple AltiVec programs. Finally, I demonstrated the amazing vperm (Vector Permute) instruction to mix and match two different string-containing registers to output anything we wanted. Bradley Slavik used my resulting diagram on the whiteboard as a puzzle for future SIG meetings.

Oh, I also got to bad-mouth MMX and KNI/SSI.

Thursday, December 02, 1999
12:00 AM