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Subject: What VTune is...

Author: Paul J. Messmer

Date: 00:06:25 08/07/99

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If you buy the boxed VTune 4.0 product you actually get a bunch of stuff, some
of which is:

* The VTune profiler (which I was referring to, simply as VTune -- this is what
is available for 14 day free trial download).  It allows many different kinds of
powerful profiling, supports source level, assembly level, or mixed.  I think
it'll do C/C++, Fortran, and Java.  It has a GUI interface which is half-decent.
 There is a "code coach" feature which can look at source level or assembly
level code and suggest improvements -- it is even useful sometimes.

* A C/C++ compiler and a Fortran compiler from Intel that are pretty much
drop-in compatible with Microsoft developer studio I gather.  I didn't consider
them for the chess engine because anything on the 90 side of the 90/10 rule I
will eventually write in hand optimized assembly anyway.

* A bunch of libraries (no source though I believe :( :( ) from Intel for doing
fast math stuff, FFTs, JPEG codecs, etc... heavily optimized for the P6
architecture.

* Some tutorials, optimization guides, and other assorted documentation.  Very
good reading for those interested in x86 architecture optimization but certainly
95+% of the information is available elsewhere for free/much cheaper.

You can use the VTune analyzer with any compiler that generates debug info
that's compatible with what the MS compiler spits out.  While I only know for a
fact that that includes MSVC and the Intel compilers, I wouldn't be surprised if
other packages out there at least included this as an option.  You can use many
features on any .EXE or .DLL at all (even w/o debug info), although you better
be comfortable figuring what you are looking at from just the assembly code.
This allows profiling, for example, into third party libraries that you might
link against but not have symbols for.

If you develop on Win32, are a die-hard optimizer (or need to pretend to be one
:-), and can stand the price (or use the trialware for a while), it's not a
half-bad package.  It's nice at least that Intel offers some decent help in
jumping through the rings of fire necessary to squeeze great performance out of
the architecture... Let me tell you how I really feel about the x86 :)  Why
can't the 21264 just be cheap?

---
Paul J. Messmer
http://www.spootopia.com
messmer@netcom.com

On August 07, 1999 at 00:58:43, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>On August 06, 1999 at 17:23:42, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>Which compilers does vtune work with?
>
>AFAIK it _is_ a compiler.  At least, it includes icc (intel c++ compiler) as
>part of the package, which can use the MSVC IDE as a front end.
>
>Dave



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