AMD Releases New Spec For Real Time Optimization

AMD Releases Specification Designed to Enable Real-Time Performance Optimization for Software Applications

-- AMD “Light-Weight Profiling” is the first specification under AMD’s Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism initiative; targeted to helping developers fully leverage the benefits of multi-core processing --

SUNNYVALE, Calif -- AMD (NYSE: AMD) today made available a new specification describing “Light-Weight Profiling” (LWP), a technology designed to increase the performance of software applications by providing a mechanism that allows software to more effectively leverage the benefits of multi-core processing. The LWP specification describes the first technology that supports a recently introduced initiative called “Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism,” which will encompass a broad set of innovations designed to improve software parallelism, and thus application performance, through new hardware features in future versions of AMD processors. LWP is a CPU mechanism that could have broad benefit to software including, but not limited to, runtime environments such as Sun Microsystems’ Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

LWP is designed to enable code to make dynamic and real-time decisions about how best to improve the performance of concurrently running tasks, using techniques such as memory organization and code layout, with very little overhead. These capabilities are particularly beneficial to runtime environments like Java and .NET, which can run multiple threads and are used to develop an increasingly large percentage of applications...