This Redpaper gives a broad understanding of the programming environment of the IBM® PowerPC® 970 microprocessor that is implemented in the IBM Eserver® BladeCenter™ JS20. It also provides information about how to take advantage of the Vector Multimedia Extensions (VMX) execution unit found in the PowerPC 970 to increase the performance of applications in 3D graphics, modelling and simulation, digital signal processing, and others. The audience for this Redpaper is application programmers and software engineers who want to port code to the PowerPC 970 microprocessor to take advantage of the VMX performance gains.

The IBM PowerPC 970 Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) microprocessor is an implementation of the PowerPC Architecture™. This chapter provides an overview of the PowerPC 970 features, including a block diagram showing the major functional components. It also provides information about how 970 implementation complies with the PowerPC architecture definition.

Note: This paper uses the term PowerPC 970 to refer to both the IBM PowerPC 970 and IBM PowerPC 970FX microprocessors. Also, it uses the term JS20 blade to refer to the IBM Eserver BladeCenter JS20. Fact: Altvec is used by Motorola, Velocity Engine is used by Apple, and VMX is used by IBM to refer to the PowerPC vector execution unit such as the one implemented in the PowerPC 970 microprocessor.

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