AltiVec is a trademark owned solely by Freescale, so the system is also referred to as Velocity Engine by Apple and VMX (Vector Multimedia Extension) by IBM and P.A.
While AltiVec refers to an instruction set, the implementations in CPUs produced by IBM and Motorola are separate in terms of logic design.
To date, no IBM core has included an AltiVec logic design licensed from Motorola or vice versa.
Both provide cache-control instructions intended to minimize cache pollution when working on streams of data.
As of version 4, the GCC also includes auto-vectorization capabilities that attempt to intelligently create VMX/Altivec accelerated binaries without the need for the programmer to use intrinsics directly.
The Power Vector Media Extension (VMX) was developed between 1996 and 1998 by a collaborative project between Apple, IBM, and Motorola.
They used it to accelerate multimedia applications such as QuickTime, iTunes and key parts of Apple's Mac OS X including in the Quartz graphics compositor.
IBM consistently left VMX out of their earlier POWER microprocessors, which were intended for server applications where it was not very useful.
AltiVec is a brandname trademarked by Freescale (previously Motorola) for the standard Category:Vector part of the Power ISA v.2.03[1] specification.
The Cell Broadband Engine, used in (amongst other things) the PlayStation 3, also supports Power Vector Media Extension (VMX) in its PPU, with the SPU ISA being enhanced but architecturally similar.
New integer vector instructions were introduced by IBM following the VMX encodings as part of the VSX extension in Power ISA v3.0.
AltiVec prior to Power ISA 2.06 with VSX lacks loading from memory using a type's natural alignment.