Intel Parallel Studio

[DavidWhite]

Some Q's about Parallel Studio ...
Steve,

Does Parallel Studio for C/C++ provide for C users parallelisation support that is not available to Fortran users?
If so, is a similar product going to be made available for Fortran?
Will Parallel Studio be sold at similar prices to existing tools, e.g. VTune, or will it be cheaper to access these tools (albeit for C/C++) through Parallel Studio? If so, will the prices for exsiting tools be brought into line with Parallel Studio pricing?

Thanks,

David

[TimP]

According to my understanding, Parallel Studio provides some automatic generation of OpenMP, in hopes that more developers who haven't tackled OpenMP will get involved. It hasn't been considered that the Fortran market would respond to that kind of hand-holding, when there is already /Qparallel as well as OpenMP. Parallel Studio drops some features of the current Intel C and Fortran compilers, such as IPO. It's an attempt to gain market share in the Windows C market, where Intel has been a minority, as opposed to the Fortran market, where Intel compilers appear to have been well targeted to demand. It's a tough situation, if one has to buy a Microsoft system which already includes a C++ compiler in order to support the Intel one, and only a minority of the market has seen auto-vectorization, better (but not best) standards compliance, etc. as drawing cards.
The greatest single reason for extra cost in the Windows Fortran is the Microsoft fee for the PPE. The cost considerations have been discussed at length here previously.
I'm not knowledgeable to speak to the policy aspects of your question.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The C++ compiler in Parallel Composer can't do anything that the Fortran compiler can't do as far as parallelization. As Tim said, there is mostly some "training wheels" type support for those scared of OpenMP. The one thing it does have is a "parallel debugger extension" which, at this time, won't work with Fortran. It might in the future.

I have no idea what pricing will be - not sure it has even been set yet.