Altivec was Motorola's trademark. IBM worked on it, too, and called it VMX, but didn't make chips using it until the 970/G5. Often lost in the noise is that Ap

Altivec was Motorola's trademark. IBM worked on it, too, and called it VMX, but didn't make chips using it until the 970/G5. Often lost in the noise is that Apple was the most visible, but not the only customer of Motorola's chips (witness all the variants that never made it into a Mac). Of course, Jobs liked to act as if others didn't exist and Motorola was Apple's own CPU department. I wish someone with knowledge would describe how or why IBM decided it was a good idea to sell silicon to him. It did prepare them a bit for the Cell partnership with Sony and Toshiba, but there's probably more to the story than that.