Apple's marketing image of a PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine.
AltiVec is a vector processing unit jointly developed by the AIM alliance (Apple Computer, IBM, and Motorola) for use in their PowerPC G4 and G5 processors.[1]
Marketing[]
A diagram of the advantage of the 128-bit wide data path in the Velocity Engine.
Although referred to as "AltiVec" by Motorola, it was marketed as the "Velocity Engine" by Apple, and Vector Multimedia Extension" (VMX) by IBM and P.A. Semi. The IBM and Motorola versions use compatible instruction sets, but the hardware logic implementations are very different from one another.
The first product to be released with a "Velocity Engine" was the Power Mac G4, which was introduced by Apple in 1999 with the PowerPC G4 as being the "first supercomputer on a chip". The G4's Velocity Engine was promoted as having the ability to process information in 128-bit increments, instead of 32-bit as was customary at the time.
References[]
- ↑ Vector processor at the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing. 2003-09-11.
See also[]
- Neural Engine, a more advanced neural processing unit in recent Apple Silicon.
External links[]
- Introducing the PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine at Apple (archived 1999-10-13)
- PowerPC G4 for Engineering, Science, and Education
- Velocity Engine at Apple Developer Connection (archived 2008-05-14)
- PowerPC G4 Architecture White Paper at NXP (PDF, 2001)
- AltiVec Technology Programming Interface Manual (PDF, 1999-06)
- AltiVec at Wikipedia
