Introduction to AltiVec/SSE Migration Guide

Explains how to convert PowerPC AltiVec code to Intel SSE code.

Who Should Read This Document

Any developer who needs to port existing AltiVec code to SSE or vice versa, or who needs to write custom-optimized code for both architectures.

Organization of This Document

This document is organized into the following chapters:

AltiVec to SSE Migration Overview This chapter introduces basic information on migrating vector-oriented code from the PowerPC AltiVec extensions to the Intel x86 SSE extensions.

Programming SSE in C This chapter describes the intrinsics and data types provided for programming SSE in C.

Translating Altivec to SSE This chapter provides in-depth tutorial information on translating AltiVec to to SSE code.

Assumptions

The document assumes the following:

Your application runs in Mac OS X.

Your application can use any of the Mac OS X development environments: Carbon, Cocoa, Java, or BSD UNIX.

If your application runs in a version of the Mac OS that is earlier than Mac OS X version 10.0, you should first read Carbon Porting Guide and Technical Note TN2003 Moving Your Code to Mac OS X .

If your application runs in the UNIX operating system but not specifically in Mac OS X, you should first read Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to Mac OS X .

If your application runs only in the Windows operating system, you should first read Porting to Mac OS X from Windows Win32 API .

You know how to use Xcode.

Currently Xcode is the only GUI tool available that compiles code to run universally.

If you are unfamiliar with Xcode, you might want to take a look at Xcode 2.1 User Guide .

If you have been using CodeWarrior, you should read Moving Projects from CodeWarrior to Xcode .

Conventions

The term x86 is a generic term used in some parts of this book to refer to the class of microprocessors manufactured by Intel. This book uses the term x86 as a synonym for IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32-bit).