A low-power, high-speed implementation of a PowerPC/sup TM/ microprocessor vector extension

The AltiVec/sup TM/ technology is an extension to the PowerPC architecture/sup TM/ which provides new computational and storage operations for handling vectors of various data lengths and data types. The first implementation using this technology is a low-cost, low-power processor based on the acclaimed PowerPC 750/sup TM/ microprocessor. This paper describes the microarchitecture and design of the vector arithmetic unit of this implementation.