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Intel upgrades developer tools to support Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - 01:05 PM EDT

Intel's press release verbatim:

Intel Corporation today announced an upgrade of its popular software tools suite for Mac OS X Leopard, the sixth major version of Apple's advanced operating system. The latest 10.1 version of the Intel C++ Compiler and Intel Fortran Compiler, as well as the Intel Threading Building Blocks, Intel Math Kernel Libraries and Intel Performance Primitives, have been optimized for Apple's Leopard and Xcode 3.0 development environment launched last month.

The combination of Intel’s compilers, Leopard and Xcode 3.0 provides unprecedented support for Mac developers to take full advantage of Intel multicore processors. Intel’s compilers contain auto-parallelizing capabilities, libraries and Threading Building Blocks for Mac OS X, and Leopard is fully optimized for multicore environments with new developer APIs and tools for developing multithreaded applications.

Several Mac developers, including Apple's own Leopard development team, Adobe and Autodesk, have used Intel's compilers since the Mac OS X tools suite was introduced in January 2006.

“Leopard, Xcode and Intel's compilers give developers powerful new tools to squeeze even more performance out of the latest Intel processors,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. “Intel's software works well in our Xcode environment, and the Intel engineering team does a great job supporting our Apple engineers and Mac OS X developers.”

“The Intel C++ Compiler has been a critical tool in the delivery of the industry’s most complete cross-platform suite of professional video tools -- Adobe Production Premium,” said Bill Hensler, vice president of Dynamic Media for Adobe. “Intel has done a great job delivering a set of software tools that allows Adobe engineers to create outstanding products that revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information.”

“One of the unique advantages of Autodesk Maya is that it runs on multiple platforms. Creative professionals have long had an affinity for Apple products, and the Maya software’s availability on Apple’s Mac OS X allows them to use their platform of choice,” said Kevin Tureski, director of product development, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “With Apple’s switch to Intel processors and with multi-core Mac Pro machines becoming commonplace, we need compilers that allow us to multithread Maya. We rely on the Intel C++ compiler for our threading work because of its support for OpenMP and performance-critical sections of code.”

Since the introduction of the Intel processor-based Macs in 2006, Intel has offered the Intel C++ Compiler, Intel Fortran Compiler, Intel Math Kernel Library and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Mac OS X. In 2007 the company added the Intel Threading Building Blocks for Mac OS X. More about Intel’s line of products of Mac OS X here.

Source: Intel