Scottish compiler house Edinburgh Portable Compilers Ltd has signed an agreement with Intel Corp under which it will license its Fortran 90 compiler technology to Intel and Intel will license its Pentium Pro code generator technology to Edinburgh Portable. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is understood the deal extends over the next two to three years, which covers the release date for the next generation Intel- Hewlett-Packard 64-bit Merced chip. Edinburgh Portable is keen to stress that the agreement is of a general nature and doesn’t mention Merced specifically, but the company already has a similar deal with Hewlett-Packard for its PA-RISC 8000 chip. The deal means that Intel gains an industrial strength Fortran 90 compiler to deal with things such as arrays, says Edinburgh. Put simply, compilers have two halves: a front-end which performs language-specific syntactic and semantic processing, as well as language-specific optimisations, to create an ‘intermediate’ representation; and a ‘back end’ or code generator which takes the ‘intermediate’ representation and produces optimal code for the processor-specific instruction set. Edinburgh Portable is providing Intel with the front-end technology and is receiving Intel’s back-end technology in exchange. The deal includes enhancements made by Intel and Edinburgh Portable to their respective technologies. Edinburgh Portable will integrate the technologies with superscalar and multiprocessing optimizing technology from Champaign, Illinois-based Kuck & Associates Inc into Unix and NT products at the beginning of next year, it said. The private company, headquartered in the Scottish capital, with a staff of 40, focuses on high-performance compilers for Fortran, C++, C and Pascal for Unix systems based on iAPX-86 and 68000, and on R- series and PowerPC RISCs. It claims that it has supplier and sales agreements with Data General Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, ICL Plc, Pyramid Technology Inc, Sequent Computer Systems Inc, Tandem Computers Inc and Unisys Corp.
