Intel toolkit unleashes multi-core potential **EMBARGO 26/5 at 3pm**

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith

Posted on 21 May 2009 at 15:57

Intel has released its long-promised Parallel Studio suite. Originally announced at the Intel Developer Forum last August, the suite is a set of plugins for Microsoft Visual Studio designed to help developers in C and C++ optimise their applications for multi-core processors - even those made by AMD.

"We do a lot of benchmarking on AMD," said James Reinders, Intel's director of marketing and business for software development products, speaking to PC Pro.

"And I'm proud to say that our products are the best choice even if you're going to develop on their platform. People shouldn't have to make a choice depending on where their code's going to run."

No more race conditions

Microsoft has previously announced that parallel extensions will be included in its Visual Studio 2010. But Reinders argues that Parallel Studio is a more sophisticated toolkit.

"Our studio can specifically find deadlock and race conditions," he explained. "Everyone else is still missing this."

Deadlock occurs when two processes hang while each waits for a response from the other, while race conditions occur where parallel processes try to access a single resource and get out of synchronisation. Historically, these conditions have been the bane of parallel programmers.

"Ten years ago," admitted Reinders, "the problem seemed unsolvable. But the brilliant people on our team came up with a solution that's devilishly simple. We can watch all reads and writes and detect where that's happening without synchronisation. With a few extra details, it's extraordinarily accurate."

With a US retail price of $799, the toolkit isn't cheap, but if it enables applications to run substantially more quickly on current microprocessors, it could prove a significant development.