Definitions for "Compilers"
Compilers interface between a programmer's high-level instructions and the hardware that can execute those instructions. The programmer writes code in a language such as C or C++. It is then put into a compiler and the compiler analyses the language statements and builds output code in a form that can be understood and executed by the system hardware. Before the Itaniumâ„¢ processor family (IPF), it fell on the hardware to do the work finding parallelism opportunities and optimizing them. This meant more chip complexity with less room for improving performance. With IPF, the compilers now have to do that work. Itaniumâ„¢ processor family compilers take regular sequential code and then break it into 128-bit sections with instructions attached telling the processor how the different instructions interrelate. This explicit expression of parallelism allows the processor to concentrate on executing parallel code as fast as possible, without further optimizations or interpretations. See Explicit Parallelism and Implicit Parallelism.