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Portland Group Unveils Compilers With AMD Dual-Core CPUs

The Portland Group unveiled a version of its industry-leading high-performance compilers and tools designed to take maximum advantage of the power of next- generation dual-core-processor systems. During demonstrations held at the Supercomputing 2004 exhibition, The Portland Group previewed parallel versions of software that had been generated by its Fortran compiler for Windows x64 running on an HP ProLiant DL585 server powered by four dual-core AMD Opteron processors. The compiler parallelized the software both automatically and by using industry-standard OpenMP parallel programming directives supported by The Portland Group's parallel Fortran, C, and C++ compilers for AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

When available in mid-2005, systems running AMD Opteron dual-core processors are expected to offer the best performance per watt in the market. Compilers and software development tools are key components in achieving this performance since they are the primary interface between a software developer and a computing system. The parallelizing compilers from The Portland Group enable automatic use of both cores in a dual-core processor without the need to rewrite application source code. The advanced technology of multi-core processors like those planned by AMD coupled together with auto-parallelizing compilers from The Portland Group will represent a significant breakthrough toward increased processor performance without increased power consumption.

"AMD has worked closely with The Portland Group for more than two years to help ensure its leading-edge compiler and tools solutions are optimized for the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture," said Ben Williams, vice president of Enterprise and Server/Workstation Business for AMD's Microprocessor Business Unit. "With an unwavering focus on customer- centric innovation, AMD was the first to demonstrate an x86 dual-core processor design for 64-bit computing. AMD and its partners are committed to technologies and products that deliver pervasive 64-bit computing, including multi-core 64-bit computing."

"Dual-core technology provides the potential for significant efficiency gains over today's single-core processors," said Douglas Miles, director of The Portland Group. "Parallelizing compilers can help realize these efficiency gains automatically by splitting the work involved in a given application across multiple cores. The Portland Group and AMD have demonstrated today the extraordinary benefits this can bring to customers, displaying not only key benchmarks and applications that are accelerated without source code changes, but also a complete suite of parallel development tools that enable developers to rapidly port, debug and tune the performance of applications on planned dual-core AMD Opteron processor-based systems."

"Dual-core processors will deliver a new level of performance and scalability, especially for compute-intense and application consolidation environments, and we are working closely with AMD to deliver optimum operating and price performance with Opteron dual-core processors on ProLiant servers," said Paul Miller, vice president of Marketing and Industry Standard Servers for HP. "We are pleased to see The Portland Group and AMD working closely to ensure that the tools and applications will be in place to accelerate the adoption of dual-core ProLiant servers."

About The Portland Group

The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, is the premier supplier of high-performance Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and tools for high-end computing systems and X86 processor- based workstations, servers, and clusters. Further information on The Portland Group products can be found at http://www.pgroup.com, by calling Sales at (503) 682- 2806, or by email to sales@pgroup.com.