Speed System & IoT Device Application Development with New Intel® System Studio 2018

Simplify System Bring-up, Boost Performance & Reliability, Strengthen Reliability

Development for system and IoT developers just got a bit easier. Intel just released  Intel® System Studio 2018, an all-in-one, cross-platform, comprehensive tool suite for system and IoT device application development. This new release (an update from the 2017 version) provides new tools, libraries, code samples, and capabilities that help shorten the development cycle so developers can bring their products to market faster, boost performance and power efficiency, and strengthen reliability for intelligent systems and IoT device applications running on Intel® processor-based platforms.

See below for deep details about what's new in this release and about Intel System Studio for common usages, who uses this product, and editions.

Download Intel® System Studio 2018 Now
Also new, developers have access to a FREE 90-day renewable commercial license with public community forum support, and paid license offerings providing Priority Support with confidential access to Intel engineers for technical questions.

What's New in Intel System Studio 2018

• New libraries and code samples help shorten the development cycle. By using the Intel® Data Analytics Acceleration Library, developers can speed edge analytics processing and machine learning.
• New IoT connection tools including advanced cloud connectors and access to 400+ sensors.
• Support for the latest Intel® processors - utilize Intel® AVX-512 instructions to optimize system and code performance.¹
• Debug capabilities and enhanced workflows that ease system validation for target devices, automate tracing, ensure reliable edge-to-cloud data exchange, and more.
• Free 90-day free renewable commercial license, which can be refreshed an unlimited number of times to use the latest version
• New ability to customize your software download - get only the tools you need.

To receive product updates, users must register or set up their account with the Intel® Software Development Products Registration Center.

New Features & Capabilities Details

Below are more details on the new features and capabilities. You can find more information in the tool suite and in individual component tool's release notes.

Eclipse* IDE for Intel System Studio 2018

• Created an Intel version of the Eclipse* IDE for Intel System Studio 2018
• Created modular Eclipse IDE structure for contribution to the Intel System Studio product
• Integrated Intel System Studio for IoT Edition into Intel System Studio 2018
• Improved remote Linux* OS target support 
  • Added Eclipse Target Communication Framework support for target connection
  • Added basic Makefile support
• Added wizards for Intel® C++ Compiler integration
  • Added local compiler integration for Linux hosts
  • Added cross-compilation integration with support for Linux and Android* OS targets
• Improved general user experience
  • Custom perspectives
  • Implemented wizards focusing on Intel System Studio use cases
  • Disabled unsupported wizards

For help creating your first cross compiling project see this article: Cross Development

Intel® C++ Compiler 18.0 

• Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) support
• New option -Qimf-use-svml to enforce short vector math library (SVML)
• Compile-time dispatching for SVML calls
• All -o* options replaced with -qo* options
• Support of hardware based Profile Guided Optimization (PGO)
• Features from OpenMP* TR4 Version 5.0 Preview 1
• Support for more new features in OpenMP* 4.0 or later
• New C++17 features supported
• Support for the atomic keyword introduced in C++11
• New option –qopt-zmm-usage that defines the level of ZMM registers usage

See also

• Step by step optimization using Intel® compiler 
• C++17 Features Supported by the Intel® C++ Compiler
• Intel® Compiler New Feature: Hardware Based PGO
• Tuning SIMD vectorization when targeting Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family
• OpenMP* 5.0 support in Intel® Compiler 18.0

Intel® Math Kernel Library 2018 (Intel® MKL)

• BLAS Features
  • Introduced 'compact GEMM' and 'compact TRSM' functions to work on groups of matrices and added service functions to support the new format.
  • Introduced optimized integer matrix-matrix multiplication routine to work with quantized matrices for all architectures.
• BLAS Optimizations
  • Optimized GEMM_S8U8S32 and GEMM_S16S16S32 for Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX-2), and Intel® AVX-512 with support of AVX512_4FMAPS and AVX512_4VNNIW instruction groups.
• Deep Neural Network
  • Added support for non-square pooling kernels.
  • Optimized conversions between plain (nchw, nhwc) and internal data layouts.
• LAPACK
  • Added improvements and optimizations for small matrices (N<16).
  • Added ?gesvd, ?geqr/?gemqr, ?gelq/?gemlq optimizations for tall-and-skinny and short-and-wide matrices.
  • Added optimizations for ?pbtrsroutine.
  • Added optimizations for ?potrf routine for Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) layer.
  • Added optimizations for CS decomposition routines:?dorcsd and?orcsd2by1.
  • Introduced factorization and solve routines based on Aasen's algorithm:?sytrf_aa/?hetrf_aa, ?sytrs_aa/?hetrs_aa.
  • Introduced new (faster)_rk routines for symmetric indefinite (or Hermitian indefinite) factorization with bounded Bunch-Kaufman (rook) pivoting algorithm.
• ScaLAPACK
  • Added optimizations (2-stage band reduction) for p?syevr/p?heevr routines for JOBZ=’N’ (eigenvalues only) case.
• FFT
  • Introduced Verbose support for FFT domain, which enables users to capture the FFT descriptor information for Intel® MKL.
  • Improved performance for 2D real-to-complex and complex-to-real matrix multiplication for Intel® Xeon® processors supporting Intel AVX-512.
  • Improved performance for 3D complex-to-complex for Intel Xeon processors supporting Intel AVX-512.

• Intel Optimized High Performance Conjugate Gradient Benchmark
  • New version of benchmark with Intel MKL API
• Sparse BLAS
  • Introduced Symmetric Gauss-Zeidel preconditioner.
  • Introduced Symmetric Gauss-Zeidel preconditioner with ddot calculation of resulted and initial arrays.
  • Sparse Matvec routine with ddot calculation of resulted and initial arrays.
  • Sparse Syrk routine with both OpenMP and Intel® TBB support.
  • Improved performance of Sparse MM and MV functionality for Intel AVX-512 instruction set.
• Direct Sparse Solver for Cluster
  • Add support of transpose solver
• Vector Mathematics
  • Added 24 functions including optimizations for processors based on Intel AVX-512.
• Data Fitting
  • Cubic spline-based interpolation in ILP64 interface was optimized up to 8x times on Intel Xeon processors supporting Intel AVX-512.

See also:

• Getting started with using MKL in Intel® System Studio IDE
• Unpack result of Intel® MKL FFT to align with Matlab

Intel® Data Analytics Acceleration Library (Intel® DAAL)

• Introduced API modifications to streamline library usage and enable consistency across functionality.
• Introduced support for Decision Tree for both classification and regression. The feature includes calculation of Gini index and Information Gain for classification, and mean squared error (MSE) for regression split criteria, and Reduced Error Pruning.
• Introduced support for Decision Forest for both classification and regression. The feature includes calculation of Gini index for classification, variance for regression split criteria, generalization error, and variable importance measures such as Mean Decrease Impurity and Mean Decrease Accuracy.
• Introduced support for varying learning rate in the Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm for neural network training.
• Introduced support for filtering in the Data Source including loading selected features/columns from CSV data source and binary representation of the categorical features
• Extended Neural Network layers with Element Wise Add layer.
• Introduced new samples that allow easy integration of the library with Spark* MLlib
• Introduced service method for enabling thread pinning; performance improvements in various algorithms on Intel Xeon processors supporting IntelAVX-512.

For more information on Intel® DAAL see: Introduction to Intel® DAAL 

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives 2018 (Intel® IPP)

• Optimized functions for LZ4 data compression and decompression, a fast compression algorithm suitable for applications where speed is key - especially in communication channels.
• Optimized functions for GraphicsMagick*, a popular image processing toolbox, so customers using this function can achieve improved performance using drop-in optimization with Intel® IPP functions.
• Removed the cryptography code dependency on the main package.
• Extended support of platform-aware APIs, which automatically detects whether image vectors and length are 32-bit or 64-bit, provides 64-bit parameters for image dimensions and vector length, and abstracts this away from the users.

See also: Building a faster LZ4 with Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives

Intel® Threading Building Blocks 2018 (Intel® TBB)

• this_task_arena::isolate() function is now a fully supported feature. Also, this_task_arena::isolate() function and task_arena::execute() methods were extended to pass on the value returned by the executed functor (this feature requires C++11). The task_arena::enqueue() and task_group::run() methods extended to accept move-only functors.
• Added support for Android* NDK r15, r15b.
• Added support for Universal Windows Platform*.

IoT connection tools: MRAA & UPM Libraries

• Includes more than 400 sensor and actuator libraries, with a built-in GUI for exploring the repository
• Support for these libraries included for Ubuntu*, Wind River Linux*, and Wind River Pulsar*
• Additional samples included which show how to leverage MRAA and UPM in combination with various cloud services.

See also : Developing with Intel® System Studio - Sensor libraries 

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier 2018 

• Easier Analysis of Remote Linux Systems
  • Automated install of Intel® Vtune™ Amplifier collectors on a remote Linux target.
• Enhanced Python* Profiling
  • Locks and Waits analysis tunes threaded performance of mixed Python* and native code.
  • Preview: Memory consumption analysis. Python, C, C++.
• Optimize Private Cloud-Based Applications 
  • Profile inside Docker & Mesos containers.
  • Attach to running Java services and daemons.
• Media Developers: GPU In-kernel Profiling
  • Analyze GPU kernel execution to find memory latency or inefficient kernel algorithms.
• Easier Threading Optimization of Applications Using Intel TBB
  • Advanced threading analysis extends classification of high overhead and spin time. 
• Latest Processors
  • New Intel® processors including Intel Xeon Scalable processor.
• Cross OS Analysis for All Supported OSes
  • Download other OSes as needed. e.g., collect data on Linux, then analyze it on Windows* or macOS*.

See also:

• Introduction of VTune™ GPU In-kernel Profiling feature with OpenCL sample code
• Memory consumption analysis using Intel® Vtune™ Amplifier

Energy Analysis/Intel® SoC Watch

• Added Eclipse* Plug-in for Energy analysis [Preview]

See also:Energy analysis in Intel® System Studio 2018

Intel® Inspector 2018

• Support for C++17 std::shared_mutex and Windows SRW Locks, that enable threading error analysis for applications with read/write synchronization primitives.
• Support for cross-OS analysis to all license types. The installation packages for additional operating systems can be downloaded from registrationcenter.intel.com.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2017* integration and support.

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

• Multi-Frame Analyzer Feature Pack 1
• Trace Analyzer PA Replacement
• 8th Gen Intel Core™ Processor(formerly Kaby Lake Refresh) Windows 10 support
• Windows Redstone 3 support

Intel® System Debugger 2018

• Added new method for connecting to target systems, called Target Connection Agent.
• Support for Intel Atom® Processor C3xxx target added for both Windows and Linux hosts.
• Support for Intel Xeon Scalable Processor / Intel® C620 Series chipset target added for Windows host.
• Support for 8th generation Intel® Core™ Processor / Intel® 100 Series Chipset added for Windows host.
• Support for “8th gen Intel Core processor / Intel®  Z370 Series Chipset target added for Windows host.

See also: Using the Target Connection Agent with Intel® System Debugger

Intel® Debug Extensions for WinDbg*

• WinDbg* supports Windows Driver Kit (WDK) version 1703. Added support for a new eXDI callback (DBGENG_EXDI_IOCTL_V3_GET_NT_BASE_ADDRESS_VALUE) to locate windows key structure KdVersionBlock.
• Extended Intel® Debug Extensions for WinDbg* for Intel® Processor Trace plug-in to support Windows public symbol information.
• Extended Intel Debug Extensions for WinDbg* for Intel Processor Trace plug-in to support ring 3 tracing.
• Extended Intel Debug Extensions for WinDbg* for Intel Processor Trace plug-in to support decoding Intel® Processor Trace data from crash dump.

GNU* GDB and source

• Added visualizer for PKeys hardware register and GS_base and FS_base system registers in Linux.
• Added Python* call backs for Intel® Processor Trace.

For questions or technical support, visit Intel® Software Products Support