We used to blame CPU makers for always launching compilers for innovative processors after the chips are released commercially (see this news-story) what causes the lack of software that can take full-advantage of newer processors shortly after they are launched. Every rule has its own exceptions: today I have to take some of the words back, as The Portland Group announced the availability of a Beta Release of the PGI Workstation 5.0 Fortran and C compilers for AMD Opteron x86-64 processors.

This is the first publicly available release of STMicroelectronics' upcoming suite of optimizing software development tools for AMD 64-bit technology processors. The PGI Workstation compilers and tools are used by scientists and engineers to solve some of the world's most challenging technical computing problems in weather modeling, geophysical processing, aerodynamic simulation and related fields. STMicroelectronics will begin commercial shipments of these compilers and tools in June 2003.

The PGI Workstation 5.0 Beta release includes the PGF77, PGF90, PGCC and PGC++. compilers that take advantage of the 64-bit processing capabilities of AMD Opteron processors. This includes the ability to operate on data sets that are too large for 32-bit x86-compatible processors. The compilers also take advantage of the expanded register sets and processor features of the AMD Opteron platform to enable more efficient execution of compute-intensive applications.

The PGI Workstation toolset for AMD Opteron servers and workstations includes all of the capabilities that have made STMicroelectronics' Portland Group Compiler technology team: scalar optimizations, automatic parallelization for shared-memory multi-processors, industry standard OpenMP user-directed parallelization, backward-compatibility with legacy compilers and tools, and a reputation for producing compilers and tools suitable for use in the most demanding production computing environments. The production release in June, 2003 will include all of the compilers as well as the PGDBG parallel application debugger and PGPROF parallel application performance profiler.

More information about the compiler is available here.