Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

TenFourFox FPR5 Countdown..

Dronecatcher

Dronecatcher

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 17, 2014
5,290
7,948
Lincolnshire, UK
  • Like
Reactions: z970, amagichnich, Jordy-G5 and 5 others
amagichnich said:
Altivec powered means that it is hardware supported and therefore has minimal cpu impact? Or am I wrong here?
Click to expand...
AltiVec is what Apple refers to as the "Velocity Engine", from my very basic understanding, it's an instruction set introduced with the G4 processors that aid in speeding up certain operations. It's similar to SSE, which is an instruction set found in Intel processors, the most recent being SSE4.2. Basically, in this use, Cameron has used the AltiVec capabilities of the G4 and up PowerPC processors to aid in playing back video, something AltiVec is often used for as it's much more efficient than just letting the CPU do the video decoding without AltiVec. This does mean of course, that G3 users will not reap the benefits of this upgrade.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: amagichnich, iModFrenzy, z970 and 3 others
Daniël Oosterhuis said:
AltiVec is what Apple refers to as the "Velocity Engine", from my very basic understanding, it's an instruction set introduced with the G4 processors that aid in speeding up certain operations. It's similar to SSE, which is an instruction set found in Intel processors, the most recent being SSE4.2. Basically, in this use, Cameron has used the AltiVec capabilities of the G4 and up PowerPC processors to aid in playing back video, something AltiVec is often used for as it's much more efficient than just letting the CPU do the video decoding without AltiVec. This does mean of course, that G3 users will not reap the benefits of this upgrade.
Click to expand...
It also means that TenFourFox becomes more PowerPC centric as we continue the journey away from the main code of Firefox.

We can look forward to T4Fx becoming more and more PowerPC customized in the future. Which is great because it improves things for us but our separation from the main FF code becomes more pronounced each time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AphoticD, z970 and Dronecatcher
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back