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Intel Releases Threading Library Under GPL 2

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the of-interest-to-some-of-you dept.

littlefoo writes "Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commercial only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commercial offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release: 'Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.'"

3 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. I'm glad to hear it by ookabooka · · Score: 5, Informative

    I attended a seminar about this at GDC (Game Developers Conference) this year. It is really nifty stuff, automatically parallelizes things for you and helps take the load off of the OS scheduler. It is also trivial to implement in many cases, for instance there are parallel loops that execute things in parallel, all you have to do is write it like a normal loop but use a different keyword (ok so it is a wee bit more involved, but you get the idea). If I recall correctly it is basically a thread-pool that manages scheduling itself better than the OS because it knows ahead of time the needs of the code. Also you don't have to know the # of cores or anything as it handles that transparently. Also it isn't limited to Intel processors, I'm pretty sure at GDC it was actually being demoed on some sparc machines. If I had the time and/or a reason to use it I would definately investigate further.

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    If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
  2. Re:task based then thread based by Holi · · Score: 5, Funny

    >There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't.

    Obviously you are in the those who don't group.

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    Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
  3. Re:I'm thinking by hrieke · · Score: 5, Informative

    The AMD question was raised on their Forums, and there is no issues with TTB running on AMD CPUs.
    And, if there was, well it's under the GPL now, and I'm sure someone would have added / corrected that mistake.

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