Working with existing development tools, Intel's tools help programmers exploit parallelism in multicore systems, Intel said. The products work with other Intel tools and understand locks. They also function with OpenMP technology for threaded applications and other parallel constructs.

Intel wants to offload the need for developers to do hand-coding to manage threads, said James Reinders, director of marketing and business development for Intel's software development products group. "We're finding that that's something that in general developers should avoid," Reinders said.

Threading Building Blocks features a template library for C++ to allow parallelism to be expressed. Developers write an application once that automatically recognizes available cores and scales performance. The tool works with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS on platforms using Intel, Microsoft and GNU compilers. The library can be used with threading programming interfaces such as Windows, Posix and OpenMP threads.

The new versions of Thread Checker and Thread Profiler feature support for 64-bit systems. Thread Checker 3.0 adds a command line capability so it can be used with quality-assurance suites; the command line interface supports command line scripts that run without human intervention. Linux support is new for Thread Checker 3.0.

Thread Checker and Thread Profiler both can now be integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 development platform.