AMD Releases New Spec For Real Time Optimization

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 15, 2007, 04:00 PM EDT

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...

Tags: AMD, ATI, spec, real, ease, Time, TIM, ses, release, EA, IM, optimization, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com

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