block_chart As http://www.hpcwire.com reported on December 16 2009, Fixstars Corporation announced the release of the beta version of its OpenCL Compiler "FOXC" for the x86 architecture starting today. This will allow software developers to take full advantage of multicore x86 CPUs to develop OpenCL-based softwares. The "FOXC" Beta version can be downloaded for free from its Web site.

OpenCL is a parallel computing framework for programming multicore systems, such as multicore CPUs, GPUs, Cell/B.E., DSPs. The framework, which is a product of joint effort by the world’s leading semiconductor makers and hardware vendor, is attracting attention as an efficient and highly portable open technology for software development.

"FOXC" is a source-to-source compiler that takes OpenCL code as the input source. The output source file is a readable C code optimized to take advantage of the hardware architecture, which may be further hand-tuned. The FOXC Beta version being released today generates executable code for x86 multicore CPUs, including optimizations using SSE instructions and multithreading.

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