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Everything I'm looking at says that the T2080 SoC they've chosen contains e6500 CPU cores, which contain VMX units (also known as AltiVec). Unless you're talki
by monocasa 5y ago
Everything I'm looking at says that the T2080 SoC they've chosen contains e6500 CPU cores, which contain VMX units (also known as AltiVec). Unless you're talking about later additions to the VMX ISA, and not the VMX unit wholesale.
I'm also seeing the e6500 listed as Power 2.06 compliant, just the same as POWER8.
AltiVec is just NXP's (nee Freescale's nee Motorola's) trademark for VMX just like Velocity Engine is Apple's trademark.
- spijdar 5y agoI was mistaken, but the end result is the same. It's VSX that's POWER7 and higher specific, which is an extension of VMX/Altivec. The reality is actually worse -- Altivec/VMX doesn't work at all in little-endian on the e6500. https://www.nxp.com/files-static/training/doc/ftf/2014/FTF-NET-F0139.pdf https://www.nxp.com/files-static/training/doc/ftf/2014/FTF-N... (search for "big-endian") So an LE distro for the e6500 would have to built with Altivec support disabled. (The powerpc notebook guys mention this in their FAQ, but sort of vaguely says that modern distros require "some functionality" not provided by the e6500 https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/)