AMD versus Intel: the compiler as referee

ABSTRACT

Intel Pentium 4 floating-point capability made x86 systems viable for technical computing. AMD Opteron introduced 64-bit addressing and extended register sets. Intel EM64T added SSE3. These features have all gradually been adopted by both Intel and AMD. This evolutionary process creates temporal binary incompatibilities between AMD and Intel processors. In addition, microarchitecture differences dictate that distinct instruction sequences be used for optimal performance on each processor type. Applications that have many users, or persist in binary form across generations of processors, must execute correctly and perform well on all x86 processors.PGI compilers provide a unique solution by generating multiple versions of time-critical routines. Low-overhead dynamic selection of optimal code paths is enabled in a single PGI Unified Binary. The PGI tools infrastructure supports this scheme seamlessly. This unique feature enables uniformly high performance on both AMD and Intel processors and simplifies builds, validation, distribution and support of x86 applications.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.0 GENERAL
      Subjects: System architectures

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors

General Terms:
Design, Performance