Cloanto Releases PowerPC Blitting Library

CLOANTO RELEASES POWERPC BLITTING LIBRARY FOR PERSONAL PAINT 7

The "personal_ppc_blit.library" for Personal Paint 7 and other Cloanto
programs has just been released on Aminet (biz/cloan/PBlit_PPC.lha).  Like
previous 68K CPU blitting libraries, this library allows Personal Paint to
work on bitmaps in Fast RAM instead of Chip RAM in supporting RTG
environments.  The PowerPC version adds to this advantage a considerable
performance boost.

Benchmarked on a PowerPC 603e running at 150 MHz, this software-only
blitter performed twice as fast as an AGA hardware blitter.  The tests were
conducted on a PowerUP board by Phase 5, running a mixed combination of
average blitter operations (not just simple copies, but complex blitter
logic).  These results are particularly impressive in consideration of the
performance overhead associated to 68K-PowerPC interprocess communication,
task switching and memory sharing, which among other things involve
frequent CPU cache flushing.  As more parts of the Amiga OS are ported to
native PowerPC code, and with the fast evolution of Amiga PowerPC
compilers, these results can only get more and more exciting.

We proudly believe to be the first company shipping PowerPC code to Amiga
users.  In spite of the very difficult times for Amiga software developers,
at Cloanto we continue to invest more than ever in the Amiga, and we are
working on new versions of popular titles like Personal Paint.  We would
like to thank the entire Amiga community for its continued support and
trust in our software.

For more information write to info@cloanto.com, or visit the Cloanto web
site at http://www.cloanto.com.

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