Intel last month shipped three threading tools to enable developers to better take advantage of newfangled multicore processors.
The tools include Threading Building Blocks 1.0, a C++ runtime library to introduce threads to an application; Thread Checker 3.0, a threading analysis tool to minimize the potential for errors, and Thread Profiler 3.0, which provides insight into how application threads interact. Threading Building Blocks is a new product; the other two offerings are upgrades to existing products.
Working with existing development tools, Intel’s tools help programmers exploit parallelism in multicore systems, Intel said. The products work with other Intel tools and understand locks. They also function with OpenMP technology for threaded applications and other parallel constructs.
Intel wants to offload the need for developers to do hand-coding to manage threads, said James Reinders, director of marketing and business development for Intel’s software development products group. “We’re finding that that’s something that in general developers should avoid,” Reinders said.
Threading Building Blocks features a template library for C++ to allow parallelism to be expressed. Developers write an application once that automatically recognizes available cores and scales performance.
Threading Building Blocks 1.0 and Thread Profiler have a suggested price of US$299. Thread Checker 3.0 is priced at US$999, or US$499 for a version supporting Linux with just the command line interface.
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