AMD Details Hardware-extension Spec for Real-time Software Parallelization

Recognizing the challenges of integrating eight or more cores on a single processor, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based microprocessor supplier Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has released today a new specification describing "light-weight profiling" (LWP), meant to help developers more easily leverage the benefits of multicore processing.

The LWP spec describes what AMD believes is the first technology to support the company's "Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism" initiative, which will encompass a broad set of innovations designed to improve software parallelism, and thus application performance, through new hardware features in future versions of AMD processors, the company said.

"AMD is trying to address multicore challenges from a community perspective," Earl Stahl, VP of Software Engineering at AMD told Electronic News. "We needed to look for ways to work with operating systems to come up with new ways to address complexity and help developers with their day-to-day issues."

LWP is a CPU mechanism that AMD expects could have broad benefit to software including, but not limited to, runtime environments such as Sun Microsystems’ Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft's .NET Framework. The technology was designed to allow code to make dynamic and real-time decisions about how best to improve the performance of concurrently running tasks, using techniques such as memory organization and code layout, with very little overhead, particularly useful to runtime environments like Java and .NET, which can run multiple threads and are used to develop an increasingly large percentage of applications.

Stahl reiterated that AMD understands the challenges developers face when creating multi-threaded software, and so the company is taking a step to evolve new methods to ensure that software applications are optimized for multi-core technology.

Given that managed languages and managed code are expected to dominate application deployments, according to a recent survey of developers by research firm Evans Data, the runtime environments that process these managed applications are also expected to be ideally suited for multicore processing, due to their use of parallel processes. If leveraged by these managed environments, AMD said the LWP extensions will provide developers with techniques for improving the performance of parallel and single-threaded applications.

Such applications include business processes such as e-commerce, financial services applications and many other business applications that involve concurrent interactions.

Further, with more developers turning to managed code and the number of individual concurrent interactions growing over time, LWP is meant to help optimize multithreaded applications running on multicore systems by reducing bottlenecks, increasing performance and enabling dynamic adaptation to changes in application behavior, AMD said.

To ensure that these extensions meet the needs of the software developer community, AMD said it plans to engage closely with developers and partners to solicit feedback and refine the specification over time.

Stahl reminded that this is not the first time AMD has worked in a spirit of "open innovation," citing the company's virtualization effort, formerly codenamed "Pacifica," along with work on the X64 architecture, as examples.

AMD's Light-Weight Profiling specification is available here.