Software developers aiming to tweak their applications for multicore microprocessors have gained a boost from Advanced Micro Devices at a Sunnyvale, California developer center packed with computers running on multicore AMD microprocessors, including the upcoming Barcelona quad-core.

The upgrades to the center, which AMD said will continue, are aimed at helping software developers improve the speed and capabilities of software running on servers, laptops, and desktops armed with multicore microprocessors. For users, such improvements mean the software they buy for multicore computers will run at peak performance, instead of using just a portion of the processing power of the chips.

The AMD Developer Center is open to all, from financial services companies using stock trading software, to media companies running rendering applications, and individual developers interested in improving the performance of applications aimed at computers with multi-core microprocessors, the company said.

Later in the second quarter, the center will add computers with AMD's latest multicore microprocessor, the quad-core AMD Opteron processor code-named Barcelona, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

AMD is also working with software tool makers and the open source community to further build tools aimed at AMD Opteron multicore processors. New high performance compilers and tools form The GNU Compiler Collection and the 7.0-3 release of PGI compilers from The Portland Group (PGI) are a few examples. PGI compliers can be used to generate a single PGI Unified Binary that is fully optimized for both AMD and Intel microprocessors, AMD said, giving developers the benefit of a single x64 platform to work from.

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are also working with AMD to make sure Microsoft's Visual Studio and Sun's Studio development software are tweaked for top performance on AMD quad-core microprocessors, AMD said. The chip maker is also updating its own performance libraries for its quad-cores.

Some of the new computing systems already available at the AMD Developer Center include an upgraded Smith v2.0 cluster that consists of 40 nodes of second generation AMD Opteron microprocessors on an InfiniBand DDR Network, as well as an Emerald cluster upgraded to AMD Opteron Series 290 microprocessors, which increased performance 30 percent while lowering power and cooling requirements. The center includes more than 80 Dell SC1435 and Sun Fire X4100 servers.