Compiler to support AMD quad core Barcelonas

THE PORTLAND GROUP said its compilers and development tools now support quad core "Barcelona" Opterons.

The PGI compilers will take advantage of AMD's direct connect architecture, will be able to use the 128-bit wide floating point units, avoid merge dependencies, and use functions to take advantage of the ABM and SSE4a instructions.

They will also support software pre-fetching to complement the level one data cache prefetch hardware and other features of the Barcelona chips.

Version 7.--7 will generate code at the quad cores, and Portland will introduce version 7.1 of the compilers and tools this autumn to include extra features and optimisations for the quad core Opterons. µ