14 DAY TRIAL // Intel, the world leader semiconductor company, has announced today the upgrade of their software tools for Apple?s latest operating system, the Mac OS X Leopard and the Xcode 3.0 development environment. The tools that have been optimized are the Intel Fortran compiler, the Intel C++ Compiler, the Intel Math Kernel Libraries, the Intel Performance Primitives and the Intel threading Building Blocks.
As Bertrand Serlet, the Apple Senior Vice President of software engineering declared "Leopard, Xcode and Intel's compilers give developers powerful new tools to squeeze even more performance out of the latest Intel processors. Intel's software works well in our Xcode environment, and the Intel engineering team does a great job supporting our Apple engineers and Mac OS X developers."
Although this might not seem to be something astonishing for the usual Joe, the geeks living amongst the ordinary people already have wet dreams about Intel compiler?s auto-parallelizing capabilities and the way they can take full advantage of Intel?s multi-core processors in multithreaded and more responsive applications.
They wouldn?t be the only ones that experience Nirvana-like states of mind because, as a number of other software development companies officials have declared, the Mac development community is praising Intel dedication in offering support to the Mac OS X software developers by continuously maintaining up to date the dedicated software tools.
Kevin Tureski, director of product development for Autodesk Media & Entertainment, declared that "One of the unique advantages of Autodesk Maya is that it runs on multiple platforms. Creative professionals have long had an affinity for Apple products, and the Maya software's availability on Apple's Mac OS X allows them to use their platform of choice. With Apple's switch to Intel processors and with multi-core Mac Pro machines becoming commonplace, we need compilers that allow us to multithread Maya. We rely on the Intel C++ compiler for our threading work because of its support for OpenMP and performance-critical sections of code."
Also, the vice president of Dynamic Media for Adobe, Bill Hensler, has said that "The Intel C++ Compiler has been a critical tool in the delivery of the industry's most complete cross-platform suite of professional video tools - Adobe Production Premium. Intel has done a great job delivering a set of software tools that allows Adobe engineers to create outstanding products that revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information."
The conclusion of all this software related mumbo-jumbo that most of us prefer to ignore? Very soon the Intel-based Leopard Macs are going to feature higher performance applications, with better multi-core management capabilities. And that translates into a faster and more responsive operating system for the Intel Mac users and an overall increase in performance.