Velocity Engine (s)

ulrik

Registered
This one goes out to all the programmers on this forum (I never programmed anything huge on the Mac since my work is programming for WIntel machines....sadly :( )

The Velocity Engine seems to be one of the most important features of the G4 processor architecture. 128k processing....damn sweet. Most apps, which take advantage of that thing (Photoshop comes to my mind) excel over their PC counterpart.

When I digged through the specs of my new Quicksilver, I realised something. Apple went from one VE to FOUR! Shouldn't this have a MAJOR impact on apps supporting them? I don't know if I am understanding the VE architecture wrong, but from my coding experience on WIntel, four 128k processing units sound rather fast to me! Is this the reason why the Quicksilver is so extremely fast when it comes to encoding MPEG 2? (something which is normally only done by very expensive hardware cards in realtime).

it would be interesting to hear what you guys think about it and if I am just misunderstanding the whole system...

thanx
 
While what you say is possible, it's more likely that whatever you read probably said something about four AltiVec units meaning that a single AltiVec unit can process four floating point numbers at a time.

It probably didnt' mention that it can also work on four 4-byte integers, eight 2-byte integers, or 16 1-byte integers at the same time too! That often gets overlooked.

Still, can you find the documentation that mentions the four AltiVec units? I'm curious to see who they presented that.

-Rob
 
arg...now I feel like a nerd....
I can't find the info! I've seen this in a .pdf tech spec about the new G4...I'll try to find it....but it could be, as you said and I feared, that I just misunderstood the whole thing...
 
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