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The Dude · Aug 23, 2000, 09:48 PM

Shame they haven't given them G4 owners something to brag about. I hope they do.

However I did notice this site ( http://www.altivec.org/ ) which said they had "tools" for the chip. Now I am wondering if somebody out there with the know how and the time can integrate the AltiVec ablility into the client. I figure that Seti@Home wouldn't want some underground AltiVec patch floating around, but maybe they could give the modified client to Seti and have them clear it for public use.

Just a thought.

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Todd Madson · Aug 29, 2000, 10:11 AM

It DID exist at one time. At the initial rollout for the G4 machines, an Altivec enabled version of Seti at Home was shown, but it was for demonstration purposes only, and I believe it was version 1.3 of the client. I also read in a recent news article about this, but it simply was too fast - too many G4s generating work units like that would have rapidly outstripped the amount of data they have to feed us. It's a limitation of the economics of the project to begin with as well as the fact that they are only giving us partial output from one telescope. Therefore, we've been using hobbled, not as wonderful clients in order to generate blocks.

Todd Madson · Aug 29, 2000, 10:13 AM

One more thought. It's unlikely that the client will be optimized. However, it is possible to optimize the math routines in the operating system. I've heard all sorts of interesting thoughts that MacOS 9.1 will be even more Altivec enabled than 9.04 was. If that's the case, we have good reason to believe that the client will run faster by virtue of the fact that the OS is more efficient. I've also heard that the 3.x Seti At Home client runs about an hour faster on G4 Macs, but slower on everything else.

iPad · Aug 29, 2000, 10:25 AM

Currently, on 2.66 beta, the G4 does run it around an hour faster.

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Evangellydonut · Aug 29, 2000, 11:57 AM

I think I've posted this before...
After emailing the head programmer of the Seti project, I got a reply along the lines of "We will not and cannot optimize Seti@home for Altivec because it's too platform specific. Doing so will mean that we will also have to optimize the client for AMD, Intel, and other specific platforms, and we do not have enough resources to do so."

The speed improvements with the newer beta release of Seti is cross the board for PCs, and while it is faster on G4s, it's slower on G3 Macs

(I think its faster on PCs in general because they got they optimized cache usage in general, and got all the data to fit on the Cache of the Duron, TBird, and PIII, and I think Celeron too...)

If Seti were optimized for alti-vec, the speed we get could be comparable to command line! maybe we'll be doing command line crunching once OSX arrives...

Todd Madson · Sep 14, 2000, 11:17 PM

My experience with DP4 and the command line client showed it was still a bit slower than the graphic client under 9.04. Now, DP4 is festooned with lots of debug code so the public beta may fare better. You may with to time the same block under each to see what kind of performance you achieve.