Hi Karl, it would be time....
At
SNDF Europe, 2004 Freescale hosted a day long session primarily focused on Altivec. By FTF 2005, this investment was starting to get results. (
Best of Show, FTF2005). We had a long conversation with John Keller at FTF 2005. John certainly was excited about Altivec. It was only two months later that Freescale abandoned the general purpose host processor business when it closed the Computer Platform Division (
Apple went to Intel that summer). In the mean time and for many years afterward, Konstantinos Margaritis continued Altivec development. Konstantinos progressively achieved better and better results. Unfortunately, after many attempts, including a call to the interested community with the
MPC8610 Open Source Mainboard Initiative, Altivec development has all but ground to a halt. Even Freescale's top Altivec engineer left for Qualcomm. The executive management at Freescale responsible for these decisions is long gone. It would be great to see some interest again in PowerPC and Altivec (
we would love to see the 8610 project funded), but we are not holding our breath. There have been too many years of neglect and no small amount of frustration from the community that supported PowerPC and Altivec.
R&B :)