By Prince McLean

Published: 07:10 AM EST

LLVM and Apple's Multicore Future

LLVM plays into Apple's ongoing strategies for multicore and multiprocessor parallelism. CPUs are now reaching physical limits that are preventing chips from getting faster simply by driving up the gigahertz. Intel's roadmaps indicate that the company now plans to drive future performance by adding multiple cores. Apple already ships 8-core Macs on the high end, and Intel has plans to boost the number of cores per processor into the double digits.

Taking advantage of those cores is not straightforward. While the classic Mac OS' and Windows' legacy spaghetti code was made faster through a decade of CPUs that rapidly increased their raw clock speeds, future advances will come from producing highly efficient code that can take full advantage of multiple cores.

Existing methods of thread scheduling are tricky to keep in sync across multiple cores, resulting in inefficient use of modern hardware. With features like OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch, Snow Leopard will be better equipped to manage parallelism across processors and push optimized code to the GPU's cores, as described in WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. However, in order for the OS to efficiently schedule parallel tasks, the code needs to be explicitly optimized for for parallelism by the compiler.

Open for Improvement

LLVM will be a key tool in prepping code for high performance scheduling. As the largest contributor to the LLVM project, Apple is working to push compiler technology ahead along with researchers in academia and industry partners, including supercomputer maker Cray. Apple is also making contributions to GCC to improve its performance and add features.

Because both projects are open source, it's easy to find hints of what the company is up to next. Enhancements to code debugging, compiler speed, the speed of output code, security features related to stopping malicious buffer overflows, and processor specific optimizations will all work together to create better quality code.

That means applications will continue to get faster and developers will have an easier time focusing on the value they can add rather than having their time consumed by outdated compiler technology.

For Apple, investing its own advanced compiler expertise also means that it can hand tune the software that will be running while it also optimizes the specialized processors that will be running it, such as the mobile SoCs Apple will be building with its acquisition of PA Semi, as noted in How Apple’s PA Semi Acquisition Fits Into Its Chip History.

There's more information on The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project. Lattner also published a PDF of his presentation of The LLVM Compiler System at the 2007 Bossa Conference.