Does Cell have have packed convert on load/store instructions?

[Infinisearch]

Does anyone know if Cell (the main processing unit and the 7 SPE's) have packed convert on load/store instructions? And if the SPE's DMA has such functionality as to stream and convert directly into the local store? I know the latter is a long shot but no harm in asking.

Thanks in advance for any info.

 

[Barbarian]

I'm not sure about the PPU, but the SPU has a very powerful shuffle instruction that will let you do whatever packing/unpacking you want. Load/stores work on quad words only, nothing fancy. The DMA doesn't support any automatic processing (like VIF did), so you have to do it with instructions after the data arrives. You can have dma-lists, similar to chain mode on PS2. The optimal transfer size is 128 bytes or multiple of that.