14 DAY TRIAL // Santa Clara, California-based Intel has just announced the release of its new Parallel Studio software tool, designed to help application developers design and debug multi-threaded applications. This new app will enable coders to optimize their Windows applications so that they can benefit from the enhanced performance enabled by a multi-core processor architecture. Parallel Studio will be available alongside a fourth tool, dubbed Parallel Advisor Lite, which will be available as a free plug-in.
“We introduced multi-core chips in 2005, and now virtually every CPU has at least two cores, some have four and a few have six or eight,” said James Reinders, director of software development products at Intel.
The Parallel Studio developer tools have been designed for C and C++ programmers using the Visual Studio product from the Redmond, Washington-based software giant Microsoft. These tools are essentially meant to help developers design their applications to take advantage of the performance potential delivered by today's multi-core processors.
The pack consists of three tools, dubbed Parallel Composer, Parallel Inspector and Parallel Amplifier. These can be purchased separately or as part of a suite, according to Intel. Each tool has been assigned a different function, with the Parallel Composer connecting to Microsoft's debugger and enhancing its capabilities for debugging parallel code. The Inspector is meant to search for programming errors, while the Amplifier lets developers see how their applications get along with each core.
The solution has been built for Microsoft's Visual Studio due to the recognized success of this platform, Intel says. “Parallelism is not very common yet for Windows, so we wanted to make it a goal for programmers to aim for,” said Reinder. “We are confident that the techniques in this suite will hold up over time for the way capabilities in parallelism are heading.” he added.
The Parallel Studio is already available through resellers and can be purchased for US$799, as a suite. Each tool is priced at US$399, while academic customers are entitled to a discounted price of US$199.