NEW YORK, October 3, 2005 – AdaCore, the leader in Ada solutions, today announced GNAT Pro Ada development tool suite support for Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.’s high-performance AltiVec™ instruction set. The ability to access AltiVec instructions from Ada was initiated by MBDA, a world leading, global missile systems company. MBDA wanted to combine the potential power of AltiVec with the ‘formality’ of Ada. By adopting Ada, the programming language best suited for safety-critical, high-reliability applications, MBDA is supporting its own stated priority to “deliver the highest product reliability while developing innovative customized solutions.”
“Using Ada with AltiVec gives MBDA the ability to reliably extract the maximum performance from the smallest number of processors,” said Rod White, Technologist, MBDA, at the recent Ada-Europe conference in June 2005. “The result is lower system costs and reduced power consumption, plus Ada’s rigorous structuring ensures long-term code maintainability.”
MBDA was attracted to Ada as a “strongly typed” programming language, a characteristic that is key to application reliability and security. AltiVec access from Ada allows MBDA to concentrate on operations, letting Ada datatypes solve data alignment issues, and achieving very low overheads. MBDA’s choice of AdaCore to bring Ada to AltiVec is consistent with the company’s strategy “to pursue and reinforce the development of strong, mutually beneficial links with industry leaders worldwide.”
“Missile systems clearly require a high-integrity, safety-critical programming language,” said AdaCore President, Robert Dewar. “Ada’s uncompromising emphasis on sound software engineering, structure, and formality lets MBDA exploit the advanced performance of AltiVec while still ensuring the absolute reliability and integrity of the weapons systems.”
About AltiVec
AltiVec technology expands the capabilities of PowerPC microprocessors by providing excellent general-purpose processing performance, while concurrently addressing high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations. Using Ada to access the SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data – sometimes referred to as vector processing) AltiVec instruction set allows programmers to capitalize on the parallel processing features increasingly common on modern processors. AltiVec adds 162 “vector” instructions to versions of the PowerPC including Motorola’s G4 and IBM’s G5 processors.
Pricing and Availability
AdaCore’s newly released integrated development environment (IDE), called the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS), will be included as part of the AdaCore solution for AltiVec. Pricing for GNAT Pro subscriptions starts at $14,000. AdaCore’s solution for AltiVec is available today.
About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial, open-source software solutions for Ada, a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where reliability, efficiency and safety are absolutely critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is GNAT Pro, the commercial-grade open-source Ada development environment, which comes with expert online support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has customers worldwide; see www.adacore.com/customers.php for more information.
Use of Ada and GNAT Pro continues to grow in high-integrity and safety-critical applications, including commercial and defense aircraft avionics, air traffic control, railroad systems, financial services and medical devices. AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com
About MBDA
With an annual turnover exceeding €3 billion, a forward order book of over €13 billion, and over 70 customers world wide, MBDA is a world leading, global missile systems company. MBDA currently has 45 missile system and countermeasure programs in operational service and has proven its ability as prime contractor to head major multi-national projects. MBDA is jointly owned by BAE Systems, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), and Finmeccanica.
AltiVec is a trademark of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.
