Standard Edition Support?

[davidspurr]

Does Premier Support still exist for v10 Standard Edition?

I posted my Support Renewal payment about 2 weeks ago. Yesterday I received the following email from the reseller:

"Hi David,

Thanks for paying our invoice #xxxx dated 16/05/2007 for Intel Visual Fortran 9.1 Standard Support Renewal.

However, I'm sorry to say that Intel Visual Fortran Standard SSR is no longer available (Intel changed their licensing system on 5th June 2007). There for we cannot process the order as is.

Because you have a Standard version with a valid support contract (expiring soon in July), you can download an upgrade to 10.0 Standard at no charge before your maintenance ends. However, after that, you will not be able to purchase maintenance plan for this Standard license.

The other option is for you to purchase a version 10.0 Professional SSR (NZ$370 + GST) instead, and your license will be upgraded to 10.0 Professional. That's only NZ$118.13 ($105 + GST) on top of what you have already paid. We can invoice you for the additional amount if you decide to go down this route.

If you decide to take the free upgrade and not to purchase the Professional SSR, we can refund you the $298.13 already paid. Please let me know what you'd like us to do.

Any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch."

Note the "However, after that, you will not be able to purchase maintenance plan for this Standard license." I understood that the only difference between the PE & SE is that the PE includes the "Intel Math Kernel Library"?

Does the above email indicate that maintenance support is no longer provided on v10 SE?

I am not entirely against moving to PE now that it has been separated from IMSL. The price difference seems reasonable for access to the Math Library, except that I currently do not use "library routines". Back when I had the pro version of CVF, I found embedding my own code for normal probability distributions, quick sort, etc was more efficient (CPU time-wise) than linking to IMSL. Not certain if this is still (or even generally) true for the Intel Library - or if some of the vector stuff would help. However, what is puzzling me is whether maintenance support is still provided for v10 SE?

David

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Premier Support still exists. However, support renewal is available only for the Professional Edition - if you have Standard and renew, you upgrade to Professional.and get the extra features. The cost is very close, so it's a good deal.

So the way it works is this - you can buy the Standard Edition and get support for a year. When it comes time to renew, you upgrade to Professional.

Intel MKL is highly optimized and it's unlikely you'll be able to beat it with your own code. If MKL has the routine you want, it's an easy decision. IMSL is a very large library but has not been specifically optimized.