AMD hosts multi-threaded software competitions

Called Multicore Threadfest, the competitions provide a forum for the software development community to demonstrate advanced multi-threading principles, techniques and best practices. Competition winners will be awarded cash prizes and earn recognition throughout the developer community, with each of four series prize winners having his or her code posted on the AMD Developer Central website (http://developer.amd.com), a resource portal for the software developer community.

The ability to run multi-threaded software applications has become critical to leveraging the performance of today’s x86 processors. While multi-threading has traditionally been used primarily by server applications, increasingly more mainstream applications that run on workstations, desktops and notebook computers are multi-threaded in order to take advantage of the benefits of multi-core processing.

“By drawing attention to multi-threaded application development through these competitions, we hope to accelerate its growth. Talented software developers are essential to ensuring our advanced multi-core processors become a platform to enable optimized solutions for our customers,” said Earl Stahl, vice president of Software Engineering, AMD. “Given the widespread adoption of multi-core processing that AMD believes is inevitable, we feel it is critical to support the software development community as it works to more fully leverage advances in hardware. Our collaboration with TopCoder promises to reward the best and brightest developers and, equally importantly, to collectively advance industry awareness and knowledge.”

Multi-core processors not only offer the ideal performance environment for multi-threaded applications, they also offer significant benefits for developers as they work on the code, especially during the compiling process. Developers often times heavily rely on their computer resources and in many cases, the speed at which software code is being compiled results in greater productivity for the programmer. By leveraging multi-core processors, programmers can take advantage of a more efficient development cycle.

Held throughout 2008 beginning on March 12, these unique coding competitions are each scheduled to run several weeks in duration. The winners of Multicore Threadfest will receive cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500. Each of four first prize winners’ code, expected to be announced within a week of the competition’s close, will be made available on AMD’s Developer Central at http://developer.amd.com/.