Darryl Gove's blog

Sun Studio 12 Update 1

Sun Studio 12 Update 1 went live yesterday. It's still a free download, and it's got a raft of new features. Many people will have been using the express releases, so they will already be familiar with the improvements.

It's been about two years since Sun Studio 12 came out, and the most obvious change in that time is the prevalence of multicore processors. I figured the easiest way to discern this would be to look at the submissions of SPEC CPU2006 results in that time period. The following chart shows the cummulative number of SPEC CPU2006 Integer speed results over that time broken down by the number of threads that the chip was capable of supporting.

Ok, the first surprising thing about the chart is that there's very few single threaded chips. There were a few results when the suite was launched back in 2006, but nothing much since. What is more apparent is the number of dual-thread chips, that was where the majority of the market was. There were also a number of quad-thread chips at that point. If we fast-forward to the situation today, we can see that the number of dual-thread chips has pretty much leveled off, the bulk of the chips are capable of supporting four threads. But you can see the start of a ramp of chips that are capable of supporting 6 or 8 simultaneous threads.

The relevance of this chart to Sun Studio is that Sun Studio has always been a tool that supports the development of multi-threaded applications. Every release of the product improves on the support in the previous release. Sun Studio 12 Update 1 includes improvements in the compiler's ability to automatically parallelise codes - afterall the easiest way to develop parallel applications is if the compiler can do it for you; improvements to the support of parallelisation specifications like OpenMP, this release includes support for the latest OpenMP 3.0 specification; and improvements in the tools and their ability to provide the developer meaningful feedback about parallel code, for example the ability of the Performance Analyzer to profile MPI code.

Footnote SPEC and the benchmark names SPECfp and SPECint are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Benchmark results stated above reflect results posted on www.spec.org as of 15 June 2009.

Posted at 10:01AM Jun 23, 2009 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |