Thursday, 16 August 2007

AMD Announces CPU Extensions

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the world’s second largest has announced a new programme that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multicore processing when designing applications...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the world’s second largest has announced a new programme that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multicore processing when designing applications.

Called "Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism," the programme is aimed at better integrating software and hardware to take advantage of software parallelism and improve application performance.

Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions at AMD said the goal of the initiative, is to help the software community optimise managed code and multiple core programming support on the hardware level.

The first of these initiatives for the instructional set is a specification called "Light-Weight Profiling," or LWP, which will provide real-time analysis of how best to improve application performance.

AMD officials said additions such as LWP will bring significant benefits in connection with a broad range of software, including run-time environments such as Sun Microsystems' Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft's .Net Framework.