Development History
AltiVec was developed between 1996 and 1998 by a collaborative project between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Apple was the primary customer for AltiVec until Apple switched to Intel-made, x86-based CPUs in 2006. They used it to accelerate multimedia applications such as QuickTime, iTunes and key parts of Apple's Mac OS X including in the Quartz graphics compositor. Other companies such as Adobe used AltiVec to optimize their image-processing programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Motorola was the first to supply AltiVec enabled processors starting with their G4 line. AltiVec was also used in some embedded systems for high-performance digital signal processing.
IBM consistently left VMX out of their POWER microprocessors, which were intended for server applications where it was not very useful. The POWER6 microprocessor, introduced in 2007, implements AltiVec. The implementation is similar to the one in 970 and Cell. The last desktop microprocessor from IBM, the PowerPC 970 (dubbed the "G5" by Apple) also implemented AltiVec with hardware similar to that of the PowerPC 7400.
AltiVec is the standard Category.VEC part of the Power ISA v.2.03 specification.
The Cell Broadband Engine, used in (amongst other things) the PlayStation 3, also supports AltiVec in its PPU, with the SPU ISA being enhanced but architecturally similar.
Freescale is bringing an enhanced version of AltiVec to e6500 based QorIQ processors.
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