Performance Study of the First Three Intel Multicore Processors

Abstract

The transition from sequential computing to parallel computing represents the next turning point in the way software engineers design and write software. This paradigm shift leads the integration of parallel programming standards for high-end shared-memory machine architectures into desktop programming environments. In this paper we present a performance study of these new systems. We evaluate the performance of an OpenMP shared-memory programming model that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2005 and Intel C++ compilers on a multicore processor. We benchmarked using the NAS OpenMP high-level applications benchmarks and the EPCC OpenMP low-level benchmarks. We report the basic timings and runtime profiles of each benchmark and analyze the running results.