Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Monday September 10, 2007

Sun Studio (Patch) supports Barcelona
With AMD's new quad-core Barcelona just about to be released in new systems I often get asked "Does Sun Studio support Barcelona"?
I want to address this question here. Short answer: yes, of course, we do.
Long answer follows.
We introduced support for AMD/Barcelona in Patch01 (which you can get here) and includes the following things:

Compiler option: -xtarget=barcelona is designed to set the right code selection, chip, cache and arch values
SSE4a intrinsics and assembly code are supported in the compiler and assembler

an exception to this is the popcount instruction, which is currently implemented in assembler and as an inline template, but not yet exported as an intrinsic

Quad-core FP support includes more aggressive vectorization (use -xvector=simd option)
Instruction scheduling has been tuned to use the new (micro)architecture. This is accessible through a compiler internal option and isnt the default yet.
Exploiting larger L2 cache and Data cache with appropriate instruction selection
Support for Barcelona Hardware Counters in Sun Studio Performance Analyzer
Several other specific changes still under experimentation and tuning...

Its too early to indicate here what the performance implication of these changes/improvements are. When the machines come out in the form of announced systems, I'm hoping we can quantify the uptake from this work. The announcements around the chip are indeed causing interesting news buzz around their use in HPC (High Performance Computing). It promises to be an interesting period as AMD looks to take some leadership away from Intel in the HPC market.

Posted by tatkar ( Sep 10 2007, 01:24:27 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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