IBM Corp says that both it and Apple Computer Inc were involved in the development of the multimedia extensions to the PowerPC architecture, launched yesterday by Motorola Inc as AltiVec (CI No 3,406). But, while both companies have the rights to use it, neither appears to be ready to say when and how they might implement the technology. Apple had issued no comment or returned our calls by press time on Friday, but IBM said it was currently more interested in boosting PowerPC performance through the new CMOS copper process. Sources at IBM claimed to be at least six month ahead of Motorola on copper, with the first copper PowerPC running at clock speeds in the 400MHz range said to be due out as soon as next month or the month after. IBM loaned Apple’s Steve Jobs a sample copper PowerPC chip back in March for demonstration in a laptop system at the Seybold show (CI No 3,368). And IBM clearly thinks that Apple is more interested at this stage in getting its hands on those chips rather than implementing the new instructions. Motorola, meanwhile, is expected to prototype its first copper PowerPC chips at the end of 1998 or early in 1999, and is currently looking at .20 micron rather than the .08 or .06 that IBM is now talking about. However, both IBM and Apple are likely to use the AltiVec technology in the future, though not under that name. Originally developed under the code name VMX, for Video and Multimedia Extensions, the technology offers a far greater leap in performance to Intel Corp’s MMX instructions. Implemented as a separate unit from the chip’s floating point unit, VMX doesn’t need to switch between multimedia or floating point instructions as MMX systems have to. It can be programmed in C and optimized from existing compilers, whereas MMX had to be implemented in assembly code. And finally, Apple is in a better position to upgrade its operating system to support the new instructions and 128-bit wide registers. Microsoft Corp didn’t upgrade Windows with MMX support. Intel, of course is upgrading its MMX extensions with a second version under the Katmai name (CI No 3,406).
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