I recently had a question from a customer who had introduced a succesful optimization to a hot function in his application, but did not see as much improvement in the overall application as he expected. This is a fairly common occurence in the iterative process of performance tuning. Usually it happens for one of two [...] Read more
This will be the final post in my planned short vectorization series. Although I reserve the right to post more on vectorization in the future! In the first post on this topic, I explained that vectorization was parallelism inside a single CPU core, achieved by applying a CPU instruction to multiple data elements at once. [...] Read more
In my last blog, I introduced the concept of vectorization, which is parallelism across data elements in a register inside a single CPU core. It’s a topic that I am very excited about this year, and in this blog I will expand on the subject to address what types of applications can take advantage of [...] Read more
One of my performance focus areas for this year is vectorization. I am excited to start creating more content and spreading the message about this technology, as it has been a little bit underappreciated in the past. So to kick things off, I am going to launch a blog series and a 1-hour overview webinar. [...] Read more
Well, I reflected on 2011 in my last blog, so now it’s time to look ahead. My basic role will remain unchanged – I help users of our Intel® Software Development Products to achieve better performance on their applications. I will still be updating our training materials and videos for the latest mainstream Intel processors. [...] Read more
It’s been a big year for us in the Intel Developer Products Division. We released Intel® Cluster Studio XE and Intel® Parallel Studio XE Service Pack 1. We continued to plan and design our products to provide support for the compute continuum. And of course we worked to grow our community of developers. Throughout the [...] Read more
As part of my focus on software performance, I also support and consult on implementing scalable parallelism in applications. There are many reasons to implement parallelism as well as many methods for doing it – but this blog is not about either of those things. This blog is about the performance advantages of one particular [...] Read more
Last week I posted a blog explaining the front-end of the pipeline on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge. Today’s blog completes the discussion of the pipeline by explaining the back-end, and then why it’s helpful to know this stuff in general. The Back-End The back-end of the pipeline is responsible for executing the micro-operations the [...] Read more
As I’m sure you know, modern processors employ a technique called pipelining to increase instruction throughput. In a pipeline, various dedicated pieces of hardware on the processor each perform particular functions needed to process an instruction, on different instructions at the same time. For example, while one part of the pipeline is executing instruction A, [...] Read more
Getting to attend conferences to give training on Intel(R) Software Products is one of the perks of my job. And last week I got to exercise that perk when I had the opportunity to attend part of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. I presented a poster on our Intel® Parallel Studio [...] Read more
I will be presenting a 2-part webinar on Nov 8th and 9th on performance tuning on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge. The webinars will walk through our Using Intel(R) VTune(TM) Amplifier XE on Sandy Bridge tuning guide. In each one I will walk through half of the guide, explaining the concepts and taking live questions. [...] Read more
New Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge support and tuning guide! We’ve been listening to your feedback on software tuning. Specifically, we’ve been working to make it even easier for developers to analyze software performance on Intel® Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge. So now I’m really excited to tell you about the new Sandy Bridge: General Exploration [...] Read more
