Back from WWDC, got news, got news... :)
Can't believe I am still waiting for G4 - it has been years since the first demos of VMX/AltiVec/G4... The good news is that it will be worth the wait. Don't ever underestimate the utility of 32 128-bit registers, a permutation unit, and MaxBus.
The reality is that the bus advantages alone from the G4 could account for most of the 50% speedup. It is when you start vectorizing your code that you get the 2x, 3x, and even 10x multipiers. Once you see a 4x4 matrix dot-product done in 5 instructions, you never go back... :)
Anyway, Metrowerks seems to have done a great job with C-level integration and support for AltiVec, so developer support should be easy. More importantly, as long as Quickdraw and Quicktime (and the new encryption APIs) take advantage of AltiVec, it will keep the Mac well ahead of the PC world in multimedia.
There have been no surprises at Macworld, except that Uber made it out as "OpenPlay" on the Darwin site. Now everyone can use the cross-platform networking architecture that made Myth II.
I, of course, was there, demoing my company's new support for the Macintosh. So, I was on the vendor's floor, and I didn't get to go to the new sessions on Carbon's new event model and Quartz... |
