Announcing Intel Visual Fortran 8.0

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Intel is announcing today the availability of Intel Visual Fortran 8.0 for Windows, the successor to Compaq Visual Fortran. As soon as I can find the press release on the Intel web site (probably later today), I'll link to it here. You can read more about the release at http://developer.intel.com/software/products/compilers/fwin/

Intel Fortran 8.0 combines the best technologies from Compaq Fortran and Intel Fortran to create a new line of compatible compilers for Windows and Linux that deliver outstanding performance on IA-32 and Itanium processor systems.

At this time, Intel Visual Fortran Standard Edition is available, with a US suggested retail price of $499. (Microsoft Visual C++.NET Standard or higher must be installed in order to use Intel Visual Fortran.) A Professional edition, with the new IMSL 5 library optimized for Intel processors, will be available in early 2004. Note that Array Visualizer, which had been available only in the Pro edition of CVF, is now in the Standard Edition of Intel Visual Fortran.

Users of Intel Fortran with current support licenses can download the 8.0 release from their Premier Support account. For a limited time (but I don't know the end date), CVF users can upgrade to Intel Visual Fortran 8.0 Standard for only $200. An upgrade from CVF Pro will be made available later (and if you're interested in that, I suggest you wait for it.)

On a related note: Many of you are aware that I've been handling the bulk of CVF support requests for the past couple of years. As of today, HP engineers will take over responding to CVF support requests sent to the CVF support address CVF users are still welcome in this forum, of course.

If you have questions, ask them here, I'll do my best to answer.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The intention is to offer appropriately priced upgrades from Intel Visual Fortran Standard - and by appropriately, I mean that it should be $200 less than the upgrade from CVF Pro. The price list I was sent initially was incorrect, though, and I have not yet received official word about the pricing. I'll try to get this nailed down soon.

I will note that, unlike with CVF, the IMSL that comes with Intel Visual Fortran Pro will have full support. You'll request support through Intel Premier Support, and if we can't resolve the problem, we have the resources of VNI backing us up. I recently returned from training on supporting IMSL, along with three of my colleagues. I also learned a lot about the library in general and the significant advances compared to the older version in CVF, including HyoerThreading and SMP support.

[Marcus_C_]

Steve,

Could you clarify this part of product description of Fortran 8.0 Pro?

The intended licensing will provide the ability to develop and deploy applications on systems with up to 4 processors. Also, deployments of applications using IMSL run-times are unrestricted to systems with up to 4 processors.

Does this mean there are no runtime royalties for retail application (boxed applications)?

Thanks,
Marcus

[Steven_L_Intel1]

There are no IMSL run-time royalties for your application (no matter how you distribute them), as long as the system the application runs on has four or fewer processors. (We have an open item with VNI to make sure they don't consider a processor with HyperThreading as two.)

If you will be deploying your application which uses IMSLon systems with more than four processors, then you must purchase an appropriate run-time license from VNI directly. Note that there is no run-time royalty for Intel Visual Fortran itself, no matter what the configuration.