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What's the point of a Core i7 if games don't run much faster?

Intel has been directing a lot of resources towards its multi-core efforts. It recently opened the Intel Visual Computing Institute to spur development of its Larrabee many-core GPU, and showed off its Nehalem-EX CPUs which can execute 128 threads simultaneously on an eight socket system. During the Intel Developer Forum in August 2008, the company announced that they were working on the Intel Parallel Studio to make multi-core software development easier.

Intel's software division is now shipping Intel Parallel Studio, a suite of development tools for C/C++ developers who are using Microsoft's Visual Studio. Parallel programming will enable these software programs (such as games) to take full advantage of multi-core processors from Intel and AMD.

Parallel Studio is comprised of three main components. Parallel Composer contains the Intel C++ compiler, performance libraries (Integrated Performance Primitives), Intel Threading Building Blocks and a parallel debugger extension. Parallel Inspector contains memory leak, data-race and deadlock detection capabilities. Parallel Amplifier is a performance profiler that analyzes hotspots, concurrency and locks-and-waits. It helps in finding bottlenecks and serialized programming.

Also available is Intel Parallel Advisor Lite, a new plug-in for Intel Parallel Studio that helps developers determine where parallelism is most beneficial to existing source code. Feedback from the tool helps programmers make better design decisions by showing the consequences of decisions, identifying conflicts, and suggesting ways to resolve conflicts.

Intel and Microsoft are collaborating together on the Microsoft Concurrency Runtime, which will be a part of Visual Studio 2010.

One of the aspects of software development that Intel has been discussing is "forward scaling”. The company says that when writing any program, it is important to consider how easily the program will migrate to utilize future machines. With the advent of multi-core and many-core processors, a critical element of this is scaling. As core counts rise, a program which is written using the proper techniques and using the proper tools is more likely to take strong advantage of the higher core counts.

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this sounds like a great product but...
By alpensiedler on 5/27/2009 12:26:09 PM , Rating: 2
it's listed as 800 bucks on the intel site. only major developers will be able to mess with that kind of price range. research students like myself will have to beg professors to fork out the money, and most other programmers will be SOL.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-par...




RE: this sounds like a great product but...
By feraltoad on 5/27/2009 12:32:51 PM , Rating: 5
Hoist sails me hearties!


By codeThug on 5/27/2009 1:16:58 PM , Rating: 2
heheheheheheh

that was my first thought as well


By jimpaka on 5/27/2009 3:14:10 PM , Rating: 3
bwahahahahaha quote of the day


RE: this sounds like a great product but...
By Jansen (blog) on 5/27/2009 12:37:58 PM , Rating: 4
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sof...

It's targeted at larger developers, who will probably go for the volume program above.

This is what you want here:
Intel® Parallel Studio Academic version for Windows* $199 per user.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-aca...


RE: this sounds like a great product but...
By alpensiedler on 5/27/2009 12:57:45 PM , Rating: 1
while that is much better, it think it's still pretty expensive. this reminds me of an excellent debugger i found for opengl apps. the trial is awesome, but then when you go to the site to purchase a license, its outragiously expensive. i am by no means a market expert, but i feel like if you lower the price more people will be willing to buy it, which might make the price reduction more palletable since your volume of sales will be up. they probably figured it all out already though and found the optimum price point. so nevermind i guess :o)


By codeThug on 5/27/2009 1:20:27 PM , Rating: 2
They'll lower it eventually. But in the mean time, all those who would really benefit from this product will pay and hopefully profit by selling their enhanced product.


By Beno on 5/27/2009 10:42:44 PM , Rating: 2
this is like the "why photoshop is expensive" argument.
you make money of it!


By Hudly on 5/27/2009 2:37:34 PM , Rating: 2
I assume that is for single-user licenses. That's actually pretty cheap, unless there is some average pricing for the type of software they're offering. CAD, 3D, and other types of software are levels of magnitude more expensive per license.

Maybe I'm missing something. Some one care to enlighten me?


Trickle down effect?
By Kaldor on 5/27/2009 12:18:17 PM , Rating: 5
Hopefully this trickles down to the consumers. Id love to actually put my 3rd and 4tf cores to work on my Q9650...




RE: Trickle down effect?
By LRonaldHubbs on 5/27/2009 2:00:53 PM , Rating: 4
You already can put those extra cores to work ;)
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOth...


If this is an Intel product ...
By randomposter on 5/27/2009 1:10:52 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
enable these software programs (such as games) to take full advantage of multi-core processors from Intel and AMD.

Why to I have the sneaking suspicion that the above statement will apply to AMD processors only for certain values of " full "?




RE: If this is an Intel product ...
By knutjb on 5/27/2009 3:27:31 PM , Rating: 2
Agree. Might help with current litigation too if they look nice with an "inclusive product". I would guess it's optimized for multi-threading on Intel chips and it happens to work on AMD.


By cornelius785 on 5/27/2009 4:22:41 PM , Rating: 2
IMO, Intel should not be required to optimize fully for the architectural features/limitations of AMD processors, as it requires an indepth knowledge of your COMPETITOR's products and maximizing your COMPETITOR's processor performance, BUT Intel should not add 'features' to the program under test that cripples non-Intel systems.


By dragunover on 5/29/2009 3:30:19 AM , Rating: 2
Actually, Intel knows alot about their competition. Think about it, if they can buy it retail then what's stopping them from looking under the magnifying glass?

Take full advantage of the threads is probably what is meant, though likely has "Intel execution optimization" I.E. SSE4 instructions aswell.


good stuff
By winterspan on 5/28/2009 7:06:14 AM , Rating: 2
This along with Microsoft's concurrency library thing and the new .NET platform's Task Parallel Library (TPL) should really begin to help the "multi-core crisis".




Name
By Oxonium on 5/28/2009 1:23:35 AM , Rating: 1
I wonder if Parallels will sue Intel for naming this "Parallel Studio"?




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