Intel Updates Compilers For Multicore CPUs

Threaded writes with news from Ars that Intel has announced major updates to its C++ and Fortran tools. The new compilers are Intel's first that are capable of doing thread-level optimization and auto-vectorization simultaneously in a single pass. "On the data parallelism side, the Intel C++ Compiler and Fortran Professional Editions both sport improved auto-vectorization features that can target Intel's new SSE4 extensions. For thread-level parallelism, the compilers support the use of Intel's Thread Building Blocks for automatic thread-level optimization that takes place simultaneously with auto-vectorization... Intel is encouraging the widespread use of its Intel Threading Tools as an interface to its multicore processors. As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism. So the Thread Building Blocks are Intel's attempt to insert a stable layer of abstraction between the programmer and the processor so that code scales less painfully with the number of cores."

Comments

Re:Intel - The Software Company

[dmoore]

I have not tried their compiler, but for the Intel Performance Primitives (IPP), a library of useful MMX/SSE-optimized functions written by Intel, they explicitly fall-back to slow versions of the code if it detects an AMD processor, even if the AMD processor has MMX/SSE/SSE2. This kind of behavior is one reason that you may not want to trust Intel for your compiler needs if you are planning on doing development for more than just Intel-branded CPUs.

Re:Anyone want to...

[LWATCDR]

SSE4 the latest and greatest vector instruction set from Intel. MMX->SSE->SSE2->SSE3->SSE4. These instructions speed up things like trans-coding video and audio. They are also good for anything that does a lot of Floating-Point. The downside is very few systems have CPUs that support SSE4 and selecting it may hurt systems that don't have SSE4 or the program might not run at all depending on how the compiler is written. My bet is it will degrade gracefully. Over all SSE4 is most useful for people that are writing custom software right now and will become commonplace in off the shelf software once AMD supports it and systems that support it are more common.
The Threading Building Blocks are yet another attempt to make writing multithreaded code easier. Frankly I don't find pthreads hard but maybe I am just odd.
Threading is very important because we are not going to see an endless increase in clock speed anymore. Intel, AMD, and IBM are all pushing multiple cores. While adding an extra core or three really does help modern systems at least a little since we are often running multiple tasks current software will not scale as well when the cores start growing in a Moore like fashion. Right now we are at four cores if Moore's law holds in two years we might see eight, then 16, then 32... As you can see it gets out of hand pretty quickly. Your average desktop will not use four cores very well much less eight until software is written to take advantage of more cores.
Yes I know that Moore said 18 months but I was going for a nice round numbers.