CriticalBlue releases optimized support within Prism for the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family

Prism enhancements tested and available at the same time as the 2ndgeneration Intel® Core™ processor family silicon

San Jose, Calif. — January 5, 2011 — CriticalBlue, a pioneer in embedded multicore software analysis, exploration and verification tools, announced today the completion of a development program which focused on enhancing its Prism product to deliver an optimized experience for software developers who are migrating to the 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor family. Software developers can now analyze their existing software applications, quickly evaluate the tangible benefits of this new family, and select the appropriate Intel processor. The 2nd generation Intel Core processor family supports the Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX) which provide a new 256-bit SIMD floating point vector extension to the Intel® architecture. Exploiting features such as Intel AVX and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology increases performance and lowers application power consumption.This announcement reinforces the deepening and broadening of CriticalBlue’s Prism capabilities with leading multicore vendors such as Intel. The recently completed development program has been validated by Intel engineers processing complex workloads such as full HD quality H.264 encoding. This complete Embedded Linux development environment, based around EclipseTM and including Intel tools as well as the Prism solution, demonstrates the differentiation of the 2nd generation Intel Core processor core architecture, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology and Intel AVX when running customers’ own software applications.Signal processing is the battleground of multicore and multithreaded architectures." said David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "The immediate availability of 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor family silicon and the customization of CriticalBlue’s Prism tool give software developers an intuitive environment to discover how much the new Intel® Core™ microarchitecture can improve the performance and power consumption characteristics of their products.""The 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor family includes many integrated features such as processor graphics and enhancements that enable our customers to deliver their multi-threaded embedded applications at the highest levels of performance and quality," said Matt Langman, director of product marketing, Intel Embedded Computing Division. "Having access to a platform-ready software development eco-system, such as CriticalBlue’s Prism tool for guiding software parallelization, helps them quickly and efficiently implement and optimize their applications on our platforms."

Prism is an award winning, EclipseTM-based embedded multicore programming system which allows software engineers to realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant changes to their existing development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware development boards, virtual machines or simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential or multithreaded code and, before making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities to introduce or add further concurrency. Having identified the optimal parallelization strategies in this way, developers code a parallel implementation, and then reuse Prism to verify performance efficiency and thread-safe operations.

In addition to partitioning software onto multicore hardware, results of this development program enable developers to use Prism to quantify the benefit of software migration onto the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family. Developers can select the appropriate member of the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family and analyze the impact of Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, data cache misses, and instruction throughput on a thread, function or source line level, resulting in an ability to see the impact of such core architectural features on the overall concurrent schedule. This crucial feedback to the software programmer would be extremely difficult to visualize otherwise. Ultimately, Prism provides developers with an estimate of the performance gain achievable by partitioning their program into multiple threads while targeting one of the 2nd generation Intel Core processors, as well as providing a methodology and flow to implement, tune and verify that multithreaded software.The Core-level Platform Support Package (PSP) for Prism targeting the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family is offered at a price of $400 (USD) per month with an annual subscription agreement. Download a 30-day evaluation copy of Prism for the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family at www.criticalblue.com/prism/intel

Key Points

The 2nd generation Intel Core processor family Core PSP (Platform Support Package) is immediately available for evaluation and purchase at www.criticalblue.com/prism/intel.
This announcement enables faster development and improved optimization of multicore software applications and hence accelerates time to market of end products based on the 2
nd
generation Intel Core processor family.
Integration with Prism allows Intel’s customers to analyze their existing single threaded application code for use in multicore 2
nd
generation Intel Core processor family devices and follow a simple path through implementation, performance tuning and verification.
Prism technology is an Eclipse plug-in and is based on dynamic tracing of the users’ software execution in a Linux target environment.
Developers work in a familiar Eclipse environment using Intel’s own toolchain along with CriticalBlue’s Prism development tools.

About CriticalBlue

CriticalBlue is a pioneer of flexible, automated system design solutions that meet the increasing performance, power, and cost demands associated with the delivery of advanced electronic products within today’s demanding design schedules. The increasing use of complex, multicore processor architectures has accelerated demand for CriticalBlue’s technology and expertise throughout all electronic industry sectors. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, with offices in San Jose, California, and Tokyo, Japan, the company has delivered multiple solutions for key aspects of embedded software design, including Prism, a multicore embedded software design environment, and Cascade, a software accelerator synthesis technology. The company is funded by European, US Silicon Valley, Japanese venture capitalists and corporate investors. To learn more, please visit www.criticalblue.com.