But perhaps, in principle, couldn't one run four independent 
streams in parallel?  Thus, for example, on an SSL-enabled 
web server, one could service multiple encryption/decryption 
threads at once. 

In practice, I don't beleive the infrastructure for that kind 
of parallelism is in place. I'm struggling to find a reason 
to develop that kind of infrastructure. Mumble something about Cell. 

If not AltiVec there is potential to use some features which come
with AltiVec like the data stream functionality. Or even the standard
PPC cache control stuff would work.

What's the case in the kernel for the memcpy functions etc., are
they optimized for doing things like longword copies rather than
byte-per-byte etc.? We found glibc sucked for that.

-- 
Matt Sealey [off-list ref]
Manager, Genesi, Developer Relations