GDC - San Francisco - Take 2

By Thomas Wells on March 30, 2009

Back in Texas and a little under the weather, but it’s time to start throwing up some of the coolest things I saw at GDC. Lets start with …

Intel Parallel Studio

This is a new software package from Intel that upgrade Microsoft Visual Studio to make writing threaded code easier in C/C++. Intel was showing off the beta at GDC and it has the potential to be pretty great. It comes in three discrete components: Composer, Inspector and Amplifier.

Composer consists of an intel optimized compiler for C/C++ along with a parallel debugging plug in and various libraries to support multithreaded development.

Inspector tracks memory leaks/corruptions, race conditions, deadlocks and other bugs that can be extremely difficult to track down without assistance.

Amplifier is an optimization tool specifically designed for multithreaded development. It isn’t as low level as V-Tune. It won’t track L2 cache misses or anything like that. What it will do is track the concurrency of your application and highlight bottlenecks caused by critical sections that may be too large or used improperly.

Posted in General | Leave a response

GDC - San Francisco

By Thomas Wells on March 26, 2009

So it’s Thursday night and tomorrow is the last day of GDC San Francisco. I had a lot of fun seeing some Full Sail guys and seeing the University Relations people I had talked to last year from Foundation 9 (Hi Julie!) and Blizzard. I had a chance to network with a TON of companies and people which was great. When I get back to Texas I’m going to post about the coolest things I saw on the Expo floor. For all my fellow graphics and optimization dorks, Intel was showing some *jaw droppingly* great tools /teaser.

Posted in General | Leave a response

First!

By Thomas Wells on March 17, 2009

The site is officially up and running. I think I’ve worked out most of the kinks. Feel free to check out my projects page and be dazzled by Rock Rivals.

Posted in General