Tech Shout!

AMD has revealed a new specification that describes ‘Light Weight Profiling’ (LWP), which is a technology developed the boost the performance of software applications by offering a mechanism that enables software to more efficiently leverage the advantages of multi-core processing. The LWP specification explains the first technology that supports a lately launched initiative titled ‘Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism,’ which will cover a wide array of innovation developed to enhance software parallelism, and thus application performance, through new hardware features in future versions of AMD processors. LWP is a CPU mechanism that could have extensive benefit to software including, but not limited to, runtime environments such as Sun Microsystems’ Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

LWP is developed to allow code to make dynamic and immediate decisions about ways to advance the performance of simultaneously running tasks, with the help of techniques including memory organization and code layout, with very little operating cost. These abilities are especially advantageous to runtime settings such as Java and .NET, which have the capability to run multiple threads and are used to develop an increasingly large percentage of applications.

Earl Stahl, vice president, software engineering at AMD said, “AMD understands the challenges developers face when creating multi-threaded software, and so we are taking a step to evolve new methods to ensure that software applications are optimized for multi-core technology.” Stahl added, “In the spirit of AMD’s commitment to open innovation and fostering industry discussion, we are making the Light-Weight Profiling specification available to encourage discussions with the developer community around how to make native and managed code perform better in multi-core computing environments.”

In a recently conducted survey of developers, research firm Evans Data maintained that managed languages and managed code will mostly dominate application installations. In addition, the runtime environments that process these managed applications are also expected to be apt for multi-core processing, thanks to their use of parallel processes. If leveraged by these managed environments, the LWP extensions will provide developers with techniques for improving the performance of parallel and single-threaded applications.

Managed runtime environments include business processes such as e-commerce, financial services applications and several other business applications that have synchronized interactions. As more and more developers are moving towards managed code and the number of individual concurrent interactions growing over time, LWP is designed to help optimize multithreaded applications running on multi-core systems by reducing bottlenecks, increasing performance and enabling dynamic adaptation to changes in application behavior.

To make certain these extensions satisfy the requirements of the software developer clan, AMD intends working closely with developers and partners to seek feedback and refine the specification over time. AMD’s Light-Weight Profiling specification is available at http://developer.amd.com/LWP.