Compilers Target Quad-Core CPUs

Nov. 5, 2007

Version 7.1 of the PGI compilers and tools from the Portland Group, a subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, features a host of improvements including code targeting quad-core AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. The compilers can take advantage of the Opteron's 128-bit wide floating-point units and avoid merge dependencies. The alignment of hot loops lets the compilers take advantage of the expanded 32- byte code fetch window. And, Version 7.1 provides improved instruction scheduling. Target-specific code generation can reduce code size by 5% to 90%. The use of PGI Unified Binary executables lets developers target the latest processor innovations from both AMD and Intel while treating x64 as a single platform, eliminating the need to target and optimize for two separate processor platforms. The compilers support C, C++, and Fortran. This latest version also adds OpenMP 3.0 support.

The Portland Group www.pgroup.com

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