"Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date."
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Member since:2006-01-06
I'm not sure what you mean.
Intel currently sells their compiler for $$$. It's not a bad compiler. I'm not sure it would be to their advantage to open source.
Their compiler is optimized for their cpus and the x86 market isn't just a one horse race, although generally amd cpus also get a boost from the intel compiler.
From a cross platform/cross system standpoint gcc is still the best compiler out there, supporting generally well many different architectures and OS's.
One thing REALLY annoying about this library is that there's plenty of access to a bunch of marketing fluff, but you have to go through the mess of downloading the code in order to look at any examples. I'd like to see some hard core simple examples of how to use their stuff. Their marketing material almost implies that the library itself goes through the trouble of implementing yet another scheduler in addition to the one the OS already has.
Edited 2007-07-25 16:39 UTC
Member since:2005-07-08
Their marketing material almost implies that the library itself goes through the trouble of implementing yet another scheduler in addition to the one the OS already has.
Ohhh, another M:N threading model. When are they going to learn that userspace thread scheduling just doesn't perform very well? Why can't they just split the process into threads and let the kernel schedule them?
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-05-02
Intel will probably never release their compiler as free and/or open source software simply because they couldn't even if they wanted to. As with several other compilers (e.g. Comeau, Portland Group, etc.), the front-end is licensed from the Edison Design Group. I don't believe that it would be possible (in a reasonable time frame) to rewrite the backend to use an open-source front-end.
More info:
http://www.edg.com/
http://support.intel.com/support/performancetools/c/windows/sb/CS-0...
Member since:
2005-07-06
What would it mean for GNU/GPL3 if intel also released their compiler as open source under GPL2? gcc is the biggest hurdle to anyone not using the gnu tools.