Shifting the Balance of Power Between AMD and Intel?
In the first quarter of 2004, says PathScale Inc., it’s going to make AMD’s Opteron the preferred processor choice for high-performance, 64-bit Linux clusters — not by helping AMD engineers get more megahertz than Intel’s, but by shipping a suite of software compilers that increase Opteron-based server performance by up to 40 percent.
Based on technology originally developed by SGI and created by a team led by former SGI chief scientist for compilers Dr. Fred Chow, the PathScale suite includes C, C++, and Fortran 9X Linux compilers that deliver peak performance for both floating-point and integer computations in both 32- and 64-bit modes. The company says its products produce native AMD64 code that substantially outruns competitive compiler offerings for supercomputing-scale applications such as complex physical and molecular modeling, seismic processing, 3D rendering, and data mining.