Intel Includes Xeon Phi Support in New Parallel Studio XE 2013

Intel released its annual update of the Parallel Studio XE development suite that aims to help developers squeeze more performance out of their applications when run on Intel hardware.

Parallel Studio XE 2013 comes with specific support for Intel's 22 nm Ivy Bridge and the upcoming Haswell processor generation with technologies including AVX2, TSX, and FMA3. Noteworthy is especially support for Xeon Phi, Intel's many-core co-processor product (code-named Knights Corner), which has been integrated in existing tools in the software suite.

Xeon Phi, which we will hear more about at the fall Intel Developer Forum, shares its x86 ISA with the regular Xeon x86 server and workstation processors, but differs in SIMD instructions and vector width. While it may be trivial to run applications on Phi, most of the developers will be fine-tuning code for optimal performance.

Parallel Studio XE 2013 may help developers to get to that goal a little faster.

Intel also added a pointer checker, Java profiling, a new threading assistant, a C++ performance guide, a tool to find and fix errors, CPU power analysis, as well as numerical reproducibility features.

Intel is offering Parallel Studio XE 2013 free of charge for a 30-day evaluation period.Cluster Studio XE 2013 is scheduled to become available in the fourth quarter.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.

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