Features and Comparison To X86-64 Streaming SIMD Extensions
Both AltiVec and SSE feature 128-bit vector registers that can represent sixteen 8-bit signed or unsigned chars, eight 16-bit signed or unsigned shorts, four 32-bit ints or four 32-bit floating point variables. Both provide cache-control instructions intended to minimize cache pollution when working on streams of data.
They also exhibit important differences. Unlike SSE2, AltiVec supports a special RGB "pixel" data type, but it does not operate on 64-bit double precision floats, and there is no way to move data directly between scalar and vector registers. In keeping with the "load/store" model of the PowerPC's RISC design, the vector registers, like the scalar registers, can only be loaded from and stored to memory. However, AltiVec provides a much more complete set of "horizontal" operations that work across all the elements of a vector; the allowable combinations of data type and operations are much more complete. Thirty-two 128-bit vector registers are provided, compared to eight for SSE and SSE2 (extended to 16 in x86-64), and most AltiVec instructions take three register operands compared to only two register/register or register/memory operands on IA-32.
AltiVec is also unique in its support for a flexible vector permute instruction, in which each byte of a resulting vector value can be taken from any byte of either of two other vectors, parametrized by yet another vector. This allows for sophisticated manipulations in a single instruction.
Recent versions of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), IBM VisualAge compiler and other compilers provide intrinsics to access AltiVec instructions directly from C and C++ programs. As of version 4, the GCC also includes auto-vectorization capabilities that attempt to intelligently create Altivec accelerated binaries without the need for the programmer to use intrinsics directly. The "vector" type keyword is introduced to permit the declaration of native vector types, e.g., "vector unsigned char foo;" declares a 128-bit vector variable named "foo" containing sixteen 8-bit unsigned chars. The full complement of arithmetic and binary operators is defined on vector types so that the normal C expression language can be used to manipulate vector variables. There are also overloaded intrinsic functions such as "vec_add" that emit the appropriate op code based on the type of the elements within the vector, and very strong type checking is enforced. In contrast, the Intel-defined data types for IA-32 SIMD registers declare only the size of the vector register (128 or 64 bits) and in the case of a 128-bit register, whether it contains integers or floating point values. The programmer must select the appropriate intrinsic for the data types in use, e.g., "_mm_add_epi16(x,y)" for adding two vectors containing eight 16-bit integers.
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