'Tis well true, I work for a computer retail sales/service center, and even our lowest end system is a Duron 900mhz, packaged with 128 megs memory, 10 gig hard drive, 15" monitor, etc. and it sells for $559. The average consumer is more than happy with it, for the basic user of Intertet and E-Mail, 10 gigs is infinite space, 900mhz is faster than a concord jet, and 128 megs of memory is overkill. The majority of people are happy with what is out there hardware-wise, which is where a really good percentage of my respect for Apple is. Apple is playing the market in a very smart sense- They realize hadware is fast enough for what people want to do these days. I believe their focus now is on optimizing the software to make the most of the avaliable hardware, resulting in a much more operable setup as far as end users go. OSX is the perfect example- Apple has acknowledged that the hardware is fast enough, which explains the lack of prominent speed upgrades as far as their hardware goes, but many, many updates and enhancements to their operating environment, to take full advantage of what the system is running on. Intel and to an extent, AMD, run strictly on numbers regardless of what Microsoft or the Open Source community is doing. I can not think of a single game/application that has recommended requirements over 1ghz, yet Intel is pushing on 3. Granted, exhisting apps will run smoother/faster on the faster processors, but in all honesty it's not necessary. The human eye can only percieve 30 frames per second of motion video, so what does it matter if a game runs at 120-140fps on a 1.8ghz system, when it runs at 60-70fps on a 900mhz system? Microsoft just released Windows XP not even a year ago, and as far as hardware goes, it's already outdated. Where as Apple is optimizing software to hardware, the PC platform seems resolute in maxing out for speed speed speed. As far as 64 bit processing goes, it does have a potential market with those who do demand speed and performance, CADD engineers, high power server clusters, etc. But as far as consumers go, until there is a 64 bit Microsoft Word which offers more options/stabliity than standard 32 bit Word, the switch over will not affect much.

Just a nerd throwing in my two cents following my own twisted sense of logic.

Marc

You're almost right as far as AltiVec and VMX. Basically, AltiVec and VMX are the exact same thing. They include the exact same instructions meaning that code written for an AltiVec-enabled processor will work on a VMX-enabled processor. The only difference is that Motorola calls it AltiVec and IBM calls it VMX. IBM doesn't call it AltiVec because Motorola has a trademark on the name AltiVec. There's really nothing for Motorola to part with except for the name. Unless there were patents on it (which there aren't to my knowledge), there's nothing preventing IBM from simply doing a clean room reimplementation of AltiVec.

Matt

Someone did some research, but obviously didn't go back to the reports that were from like 1998, I used to know all the stats, but just because of time, I had to go back over some things. The VMX big word here, WAS, again WAS, the same as the AltiVec, infact if you read the original contract, it was a colaborative effort between, get this, as I said, between Apple, Motorola, Mercury Computer Systems, and big one, IBM. Did I just say that IBM and Apple worked together, you bet I did. IBM called the AltiVec, the VMX, derrived, I believe Vector Management Something... But it was the same project, just IBM wouldn't agree on the name the funder, Apple, wanted. But if you can find, that is a big if, because you will not find those records, because they were not released on the net, but it states that Apple wanted the VMX/AltiVec to evolve into a superior processing component, today know as the 4th parallel, while IBM, being behind in the graphics/audio game wanted it to evolve into a superior audio sector of the chip. The dissagreement split the agreement, and long time partner Motorola went with apple, and so did the AltiVec, and the VMX went with IBM. In doing so, each company got to do what they wanted with the technology. IBM took the VMX and made it into an audio/video boost, which didn't do too too much overall, but with Apple and Motorola, well it became the increadable piece of hardware/software. Apple/Motorola made the AltiVec evolve into two parts, a piece of software, and a piece of hardware, which eliminiates the bottle neck of the processor, and in doing this bounces the processor speed, this bounce does this, you take the G4+ 7455 Processor, with AltiVec, with a chip that has only 1.25GHz, but no bottle-neck, now, you take a Pentium 4 @ 2GHz, but it has a mammoth bottle-neck, so, if compare them, the G4 runs faster output than the P4, in Pentium terms the 1.25GHz G4 runs a faster output than the P4. In Pentium terms, the G4 runs like a Pentium 2.5GHz chip.
All in All, the IBM chip will not have a version of the AltiVec, reason, it doesn't know how the devil to build it, they will have to make up for about 4 years of evolution, so it the new chip = poo poo.
~Mr. Ivey

I really couldn't following what you said. Sorry but the writing wasn't very clear. That said, according to ArsTechnica (who I'd bet know quite a bit more about processor architecture than either of us), seem to think that the PPC 970 will implement the entire AltiVec instruction set: "This dedicated SIMD unit, which implements the Altivec instruction set (IBM calls it "VMX" because "Altivec" is a Moto trademark), is good news for those of us who were afraid that IBM would take the less desirable approach of re-using the two 64-bit floating-point units as a 128-bit vector unit (ala the P4)" (http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/3q02/powerpc.html). That said, I don't really think you understand how a vector processing unit works. It's built-in to the processor and consists of specialized instructions that can be executed by a special part of the processor. Now, there isn't any bypassing of a "bottleneck" in the processor by using vector processing instructions. These instructions do move through the regular processor pipeline just as any instruction would.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about AltiVec being a piece of software. It's not. It's implemented in hardware. What you may mean is that Apple has provided certain API's (Application Programming Interface) that take advantage of the special vector processing instructions. Given that these instructions are exactly the same on the PPC 970, it means that there needs to be no change to any part of the Operating System to take advantage of the vector processor instructions in the PPC 970 (opposed to any changes that just need to take advantage of vector processing instructions in general).

As far as the idea that x86 doesn't have a SIMD unit, it's patently false. MMX, SSE, and 3dNOW are all SIMD (or vector processing) units. They all operate in the same fashion as AltiVec.

Matt

That's not what my report said that just came to me like a week ago. The AltiVec, is the piece of hardware that takes out the bottle-neck, the VMX is a processor within a processor, that handels sub processes. From what the documentation says. You can call Motorola wrong if you please, and I don't doubt that http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/3q02/powerpc.html knows more than the two of us, but this is from Apple:

The Velocity Engine
Behind the PowerPC G4’s phenomenal performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. The Velocity Engine processes data in huge 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it’s the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers — except that we’ve added 162 new instructions to speed up computations). In addition, the PowerPC G4 can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle — two to four times faster than processors found in run-of-the-mill PCs.


I hope the image worked. But there it is.
Go here for some more info about G4 speed compaired to the IBM NetVista Alta 1.7GHz Pentium 4 Processor: http://www.apple.com/g4/myth/
~Mr. Iveh

FYI, IBM is surging ahead today, up $7 odd dollars.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...kets_stocks_dc

Wow, now tht is truly amazing.
Mr. Ivey

You've fallen into the fallacy of believing marketing. While Motorola claims that AltiVec "breaks up the bottleneck," that has absolutely nothing to do with how AltiVec works. AltiVec is a vector processing unit or SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). How it works is that all of the data is stuck into the Vector Processing Registers (there are two 128-bit registers on both the G4 and the PPC 970). The size of the register allows multiple sets of data to be inserted into the register at once (hence the comment about 4 32-bit integers). Then, a SIMD instruction is sent to the processor. This instruction tells the processor to preform an operation on all the data in the 128-bit register (if you pass an add 5 instruction to the processor, it will add 5 to each piece of data stored in the vector processing register). This is the name for both AltiVec and VMX. This is both "bottleneck breakup" as well as the "processor-within-a-processor." It could be consider a "processor-within-a-processor" because its a distinct subunit of the processor (much like the Floating Point Unit). So, yes, AltiVec and VMX are the same thing. For reference, look here:
http://www.simdtech.org/home

I'd also like to point out this quote from that site:
"AltiVec(tm) is Motorola's trademark for the first PowerPC SIMD extension. AltiVec was jointly developed by Motorola, IBM, and Apple. This same SIMD technology is called Velocity Engine by Apple. When IBM talks about this particular technology option they use VMX, the technology's original code name. "

Matt