http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...elped-amd-5ghz
Optimised for AMD microarchitecture
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday, 25 October 2007, 2:56 PM
THE PORTLAND GROUP said the latest version of its compilers gave AMD the ability to run Opteron quad core 2.5GHz processors 27 per cent faster than the same benchmark on 3GHz Xeon X5365 quad core core chips.
The SPECfp_rate-base2006 results compare the Opteron to the Xeon, which runs Intel 10.1 compilers.
The release - PGI 7.1 - now includes optimising PGI compilers and tools for Macinteltosh machines, and a tools suite for Windows which supports bugging of MSMPI apps on HPC.
The compilers, said Portland, support Open MP and MPI including graphical debug and profiling tools. The firm said that developers face a "substantial challenge" of porting old serial apps to effectively use multiple cores.
AMD senior director Michael Goddard, said: "PGI and AMD have been cooperating through [during] 2007 to ensure PGI compilers are highly tuned for the new micro-architectures and features of quad core Opteron processors."
Douglas Miles, a director at TPG, said 7.1 is the fastest Fortran compiler and C and C++ compilers show performance gains of over 10 per cent on version 7.0. µ