IDF: Toolkit will help developers write for multi-core CPUs

 

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Posted on 21 Aug 2008 at 07:31

Intel is preparing a software development toolkit to help programmers get the best from multi-core processors.

It was announced at the Intel Developer Forum that the new Intel Parallel Studio would be ready for public beta testing in November, with the full package to be released next year.

With this announcement, Intel has implicitly acknowledged the difficulty of realising the potential of its current processor designs. Almost every Intel processor available has either two or four cores, and high-end Core i7 chips will raise the ante further with eight cores on a single die.

Yet the majority of current applications are single-threaded, and derive little or no benefit from running on a multi-core CPU.

Visual Studio plug-ins

The Intel Parallel Studio is a suite of plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio, designed in consultation with developers, to help create code that will run more efficiently on multiple cores.

Components include the Parallel Advisor, which aims to identify parallelisable code; the Parallel Composer, which includes libraries to help parallelise routines; the Parallel Inspector, designed to detect potential problems such as race conditions; and the Parallel Amplifier, which analyses performance to identify bottlenecks.

The standard edition of the studio will be followed by a version specifically targeted at Larrabee, which is expected to launch with as many as 32 cores.

For more information, or to sign up for the beta programme, visit Intel's parallel computing website.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith in San Francisco