Roman Shaposhnik's

There used to be a time when hardware (especially CPUs) had a much longer release cycle compared to software. Not anymore. The silicon industry has joined the "frenetic squirrel" squad and cranks up updates of architectures at a pretty alarming pace. Of course, for C, C++ and Fortran developers it means only one thing -- your compilers have to stay ahead of the game, otherwise you might as well program that shiny new CPU in an assembly language.

The good news for Sun Studio 12 users is that the only thing that separates you from the kick ass performance on the latest contraptions from AMD and Intel is this set of patches. So, if you are planning to deploy on Intel's Woodcrest and Clovertown or AMD's Barcelona chips, just download the patches, install them and don't forget to tell the compiler what you want:

1. if your development and deployment boxes are the same:-xtarget=native
2. same as above, but forcing 64bit code generation:-xtarget=native64
3. if your target is Intel's Woodcrest and Clovertown in 32bit mode:-xtarget=woodcrest -m32
4. if your target is Intel's Woodcrest and Clovertown in 64bit mode:-xtarget=woodcrest -m64
5. if your target is AMD's Barcelona in 32bit mode:-xtarget=barcelona -m32
6. if your target is AMD's Barcelona in 64bit mode:-xtarget=barcelona -m64