Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Wednesday August 13, 2008

Whats New for Compilers in Sun Studio Express 7/08
After discussing Whats New in IDE, D-light and DTrace GUI and Documentation  for Sun Studio Express 7/08,  I'd like to cover compilers.

• Performance, Performance, Performance: This is of course, the #1 focus for any Sun Studio release. In this release, we have rolled in changes that were made in Sun Studio 12 patches on SPARC. Sun's BMSeer blog has already noted the benchmark numbers on the recently released Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 machines, in which Sun Studio has played a critical role. Among these:
• World Record SPECompL2001 numbers on Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000
  
• World Record 2+ TeraFLOP Linpack HPC benchmark performance on Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000
• World Record SPECfp2006 numbers on Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000
• Improved Performance on x86. Previously, Sun Studio had trailed Intel Compilers (ICC) on the newer Penryn platform, while being very competitive (or better) on Woodcrest. One notable gap was the auto-parallelization in the SPEC program, libquantum. We've improved this immensely and are seeing very impressive scaling on this benchmark. Other improvements include instruction selection, improved auto-parallelization overall and improved micro-vectorization, among many others.
• Support for new architectures, including AMD's Barcelona, Intel's Penryn and Nehalem and new quad-core SPARC64-based SPARC Enterprise servers.
  
• Support for SSSE3, SSE4a, SSE4.1, SSE4.2 instruction sets both in assembler/disassembler (and dbx) as well as compiler intrinsics
• -xarch, -xtarget, -xchip, -xcache support
  
• Sun Performance library support for new architectures
• x86 assembler has been extended to understand GNU assembler syntax,
  
• Context sensitive mnemonics without suffix. For example, mov $10, mem the Sun Studio Assembler defaults to movl $10, mem
• GNU Assembler compatible instruction synonyms have been added:
  cbw==cwtd, cwd==cwtd, cwde==cwtl, cdq==cltd, cdqe==cltq, cqo==cqto,
  movzb==movzbl, sysret==sysretl
• GNU Assembler compatible assembler directives have been added: .p2align,.extern,.global,.
• x86 assembler can assemble 32bit memory addresses in -m64 mode
  
• OpenMP 3.0 APIs implemented. This wiki describes the features and implementation in greater detail.
• Interval arithmetic support for C++ on x86 (-xia option)
• C++ now inlines code with -g and any optimization option
• The pragma #pragma must_have_frame(list-of-function-names) is now supported.
• Additional support for GCC source compatibility, including
• __FUNCTION__ is a predefined identifier that contains the name of the lexically-enclosing function
• A case label in a switch statement can have a case range now
• The second operand in a conditional expression can be omitted.eg
• x ? : y is now equivalent to  x? x: y except that x is not reevaluated
• Additional _attribute_ values are supported, eg:
• _attribute_((const))
• _attribute_((constructor))
• _attribute_((destructor))
• Fortran 2003 IMPORT statement is now implemented.
  

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