AMD Announces Extensions for Parallel Programming

AMD has no intentions of giving up on x86 yet, and has proved that with their announcement of extensions for software parallelism to help make parallel programming easier and also better optimized. The first extension, which has no tentative date, will give software access information about expired instructions and cache misses to improve performance. This “lightweight profiling” would give near real-time analysis of performance, without causing a performance hit. If you are not a developer, this announcement won’t mean much, but you can sit back and bask in the fact that AMD is still hard at work, developing new technologies.

“As we look ahead in multicore systems, we see the need for hardware and software to work together to evolve a new set of techniques,” said Earl Stahl, vice president of software engineering at AMD. “We see this as the first of a family of family of extensions, and we are working on others,” he added.

Source: EE Times