Later than the rest, Motorola Inc has decided to add the equivalent of MMX multimedia capabilities to the PowerPC RISC chip, claiming it will result in a tenfold performance increase over standard PowerPC microprocessors. Yesterday, Motorola’s Networking and Computer Systems Group said it would be introducing technology it calls AltiVec to new generations of the PowerPC microprocessor. AltiVec will be included with the G4 generation four versions of the PowerPC later this year, and promises additional performance for networking, graphics, video and voice applications through the addition of a 128-bit vector execution unit, which operates concurrently with the existing integer and floating point units. It adds 162 new instructions and is said to be able to handle up to 16 complex data streams in parallel, according to Motorola. Compared with the 8×16-bit wide register entries offered by the Intel MMX and 32×64-bit registers of Sun’s VIS visual instruction set and the MIPS MDMX, Motorola will offer 32 x 128-bit register entries, a significant enhancement it says. Motorola has always maintained that the PowerPC outperformed MMX for multimedia applications even without special instructions. But now it says the new PowerPC chips will outperform some ASICS and digital signal processors, and open up the market for the PowerPC to such applications as voice over IP, multi-channel modems, routers, virtual private networks, speech processing, image and video processing, image and video processing and array processing. The first microprocessor with AltiVec will be produced using Motorola’s HiP 5 copper interconnect manufacturing process and will target very high- performance applications, though Motorola said future processors could address price and power-sensitive applications. Motorola is working with compiler vendors to support the extensions. There was no word on IBM Corp’s position on AltiVec as we went to press, although last year the two companies announced a common development stream for embedded PowerPC chips, and hinted that multimedia extensions were part of the roadmap (CI No 3,304).
