IBM Rejiggers AIX Compilers for Power6 Chips

Published: June 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having announced a new processor, the dual-core Power6 chip, its first server to make use of it, a souped-up version of the System p 570, and a variant of the AIX 5.3 operating system that has had its microcode tweaked so it can run on the Power6, now IBM has to get its compilers to speak Power6 as well. And so, this week, IBM announced that its XL family of compilers for the AIX platform have been updated to support the Power6 chip.

The XL family of compilers includes XL Fortran Enterprise Edition V11.1, XL C Enterprise Edition V9.0, and XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition V9.0. All three are available for electronic download starting on June 8, when that System p 570 will ship, and will be distributed on media starting July 6. They will work on Power6 machines running on AIX 5.2 (which has very limited support) and AIX 5.3. Obviously, earlier IBM iron will also support these compilers, too, including PowerPC-based JS20 and JS21 blade servers for the BladeCenter machines. The new compilers do not support the Power1, Power2, and PowerPC 601 processors, by the way, which are a bit long in the tooth.

The updated Fortran compiler continues to roll out features that adhere to the Fortran 2003 standard, a process that IBM began some time ago with XL Fortran 8.1 compiler. With V11.1, IBM is implementing the full object-oriented programming model for Fortran 2003 as well as adding user-defined derived I/O, new I/O specifiers, and asynchronous I/O. XL Fortran V11.1 costs $3,440 per developer, including one year of maintenance.

The new C and C++ compilers run on the same iron as the Fortran compilers, and don't run on the same iron, too. The interesting new feature that these C and C++ compilers support is the decimal floating point unit that IBM has woven into the Power6 core. As was the case with the Fortran V11.1 compiler, the C and C++ V9.0 compilers have a lot of optimizations and tunings that take advantage of the new instruction scheduling mechanisms inside the Power6 chip, which makes it run more efficiently than Power4 or Power5 processors. XL C Enterprise Edition V9.0 costs $1,112 per developer, while XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition V9.0 costs $3,569; both prices include a year of software maintenance.

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