About vista being dropped for XE 2013

[Brian_Francis]

Hi,

I would like clarification on dropping vista for using the XE 2013 suite.

Is it that it will not be supported anymore or will it really not work if i try installing fortran XE 2013 on my vista box?

Thanks

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Not supported. I suspect the install will fail with an error, but I am not sure about that. We dropped it because the costs of testing on Vista seemed to exceed the value to the customer base. The data we have shows that very few of our customers are on Vista. That said, applications you build o a supported platform should run fine on Vista assuming it has all the Windows API routines you need.

[IanH]

A "very close friend of mine", who is notoriously incapable of reading release notes, told me that he had no issues installing XE 2013 on his vista laptop on top of VS2010 professional. He says it seems to work ok. He has noticed some strangeness in the integration (views opened when the debugger is active have no syntax highlighting, large solutions opened for a few hours may eventually crash due to virtual memory exhaustion, the syntax highlighting seems to equivocate about whether to colour intrinsics or not as he is typing), but I am, oops, I mean - he is - more or less running as with XE 2011 before.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Ian, tell your "friend" that the syntax coloring issue is not Vista-related. While I have not yet tried this myself (I do have a Vista system at home I could hook up), I would have expected some sort of message at install. Glad to hear that you - er, your friend - finds it works. However, please do note the warning that XP support will be dropped in a future major release.

[Brian_Francis]

We do use a lot of fortran source code so i would like to know what kind of performance improvement i should expect upgrading from XE 2011 to XE 2013? Keep in mind we basically use only F77 syntax and we do not use any REAL(16), COMPLEX(16) or COMPLEX(32). We also already use the parallel source compilation available in XE 2011 as experimental and it works great for us. If you can tell me that there is no overall performance improvement, i will not push to upgrade the few vista OS to 7 as it will not be worth the time doing it. Thank you

[TimP]

I doubt that anyone could make a blanket statement about performance. Some of the performance improvements are associated with AVX, which you probably can't use on a platform old enough to be running Vista. Others are associated with the simd firstprivate/lastprivate directives, and some of those have carried into the most recent 2011 update.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

We ran the Polyhedron benchmarks on a configuration very similar to what they use (a "Sandy Bridge" processor) and saw improvements ranging from 2% up to about 60%, with the average being around 3-5%. Again, your mileage may vary.