Intel unveils new products for developers

SANTA CLARA: Intel Corporation announced the availability of new versions of its Intel Thread Checker, Intel Thread Profiler, Intel VTune Performance Analyzer and Intel Threading Building Blocks. These software development products enable developers to create more reliable, scalable applications, and have now been enhanced for the latest multi-core processors and operating systems.

"Our Intel Core 2 processors have essential new profiling capabilities we're taking advantage of for the first time in our VTune Analyzer 9.0. Since nearly all systems shipping with Windows Vista will be multi-core systems, developers targeting Vista have been asking us for these parallelism tools," said James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel's Developer Products Division.

He added "Developers on all operating systems want their move to parallelism well supported by development tools and we're committed to keeping up with our aggressive pace of supporting developers in as many ways as possible."

Performing multiple tasks simultaneously is referred to as "running in parallel." Parallelism is accessed in hardware and operating systems with the concept of threads of execution that are easier to program when abstracted into the software concepts of data and task parallelism. The new products helps to simplify parallel programming and represent an efficient way for development teams to prepare applications for multi-core processors. These products ensure threaded applications are scaleable, reliable and optimized for current and future processor innovations.

Intel Thread Checker 3.1 for Windows and Linux detects errors in the coding of parallelism so that developers can introduce threading more safely and quickly. With its patented advanced error protection engine, the product provides "thread safety" by identifying the most obscure threading errors in 64-bit applications. This tool is enhanced with optimized performance for lower instrumented image size and runtime overhead, which gives developers even faster analysis.

Intel Thread Profiler 3.1 for Windows provides developers with insight into how application threads behave and pinpoints parallel performance issues such as bottlenecks. It allows developers to measure the number of cores that are effectively utilized by the application and indicates the percentage of the code that is not optimally parallelized for the hardware platform on which the application is running. This updated version now offers selectable stackwalking for much faster analysis and display, and is easier to use repeatedly through support for automatic recall of custom configuration settings within an activity. This updated product increases consistency and saves developers time on repetitive tasks.

Intel Threading Building Blocks 1.1 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X is a C++ template library that simplifies introducing threads to an application, making performance gains possible while shielding software developers from the low-level complexity of assigning threads to processor cores. It enables developers to write an application once that automatically recognizes the number of available cores and scales performance appropriately. This enhanced version includes an automatic grain size calculator for optimal algorithm parallelization.

Intel VTune Performance Analyzer 9.0 is a solution that helps developers run their software faster on single and multi-core systems. Vista users now have full support, including Intel's new signed driver, which will install without Vista blocking for security concerns. Intel Core 2 Duo and Quad processors have significantly enhanced performance analysis capabilities and support more events, higher precision in event location correlation and an innovative new pipeline stall accounting. The stall accounting features radically improve tuning by focusing the user on instances of possible issues, such as cache misses.

VTune 9.0 for Linux offers a new connection between the Intel compiler's analysis and VTune run time analysis of hotspots. This new version contains an intuitive hotspot navigator that enables developers to scroll to the source from hotspot to hotspot. This allows users to identify hotspots and benefit from the knowledge built into the Intel compiler.

CIOL Bureau