Items tagged with compiler
Just yesterday, we addressed the dubious claim that Intel's Clover Trail+ low power mobile processors had somehow seized a massive lead over ARM's products and we noted some of the suspicious discrepancies in the popular AnTuTu benchmark. It turns out that the situation is far shadier than we initially thought. The latest benchmark version isn't just tilted to favor Intel -- it seems to flat-out cheat to accomplish it. Anandtech forum user Exophase went digging into the benchmark source code to determine why the latest version showed such one-sided gains in favor of x86 processors. AnTuTu is basically nBench, a mid-1990s benchmark that was compiled by the now-defunct Byte magazine. The new 3.3...
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Want to scare the life out of a programmer friend? Just utter the words "multi-threading" into their ear - it works every time! Alright - that's a bit of an exaggeration, but writing multi-threaded code is one of the biggest challenges a programmer can ever face. The reason boils down to the fact that for the longest time, everyone wrote code that best-suited single-core processors - which just happened to get faster every year. When we reached the peak of processor frequency a number of years ago, multi-core processors became the only way to move forward. While these CPUs are excellent for getting big jobs done fast, they've proven to be a nightmare for programmers who have to spend a lot...
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A key Microsoft kernel architect, David Probert, has come out with a surprising statement regarding Windows' ability to harness multiple cores. While Windows has taken advantage of multicore technology for over a decade, Probert notes that users rarely see the performance that they should. "Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?" Probert asked in a presentation last week at the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center in Champaign-Urbana. Each successive OS release from Microsoft has improved multicore scaling but bottlenecks regularly occur as multiple applications jockey for position. Priority scheduling helps a certain amount, but it's...
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PGI and NVIDIA Team To Deliver CUDA Fortran CompilerFortran support for NVIDIA CUDA GPUs to be incorporated into a new version of the PGI Fortran compiler Hamburg, Germany, June 23, 2009 - The Portland Group , a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a leading supplier of compilers for high-performance computing (HPC), today announced an agreement with NVIDIA under which the two companies plan to develop new Fortran language support for CUDA GPUs.The NVIDIA CUDA architecture allows developers to offload computationally intensive kernels to the massively parallel GPU. Through function calls and language extensions, CUDA gives developers explicit control over the mapping of general-purpose...
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Whether AMD or Intel is on top of the CPU world, there's one CPU related area in which Intel has historically been very successful: Compilers. With today's press release, it seems that Intel is taking their current focus on multi-threading even further: "Intel Corporation today announced the availability of two software products that help developers efficiently create more reliable, high-performing applications that speed up a computer's responsiveness. The Intel® C++ Compiler and Fortran Professional Editions bring together a unique combination of highly optimizing compilers, performance libraries and the Intel Threading Building Blocks." With four cores quickly becoming the new standard...
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