SYSTEMS

SANTA BARBARA, CA -- Green Hills Software today announced that Mercury Computer Systems (NASDAQ:MRCY) is offering Green Hills Software's C++ optimizing compiler for use with its PowerPC-based RACE++ multiprocessor systems. Mercury, which also offers its own development tools and GNU-based compilers, will now offer bundled solutions based on Green Hills Software's MULTI Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and higher performance PowerPC/AltiVec compilers. Mercury Computer Systems provides high-performance VME, PCI and cPCI multiprocessing systems for digital signal and image processing applications based on the RACEway Interlink Standard. The RACEway standard (RACEway Interlink ANSI/VITA 5-1994), originally developed by Mercury, transforms the PCI and VMEbus from single-transaction buses into scalable, real-time, switched fabrics that are ideal for multiprocessing applications. Mercury's second-generation RACE++ architecture extends the aggregate bandwidth of RACE crossbar switches from 480 Mbyte/sec to 5.1 Gbyte/sec. Since the summer of 2001, Mercury has been shipping MULTI IDE as the standard development environment for new RACE++ customers. Today, following a rigorous benchmark comparison in which the Green Hills C compiler outperformed Mercury's GNU C compiler across a wide range of customer-critical applications, Mercury has made the decision to recommend Green Hills' C/C++ compilers to new customers as the highest-performance development solution. "This relationship represents a tremendous validation of our compiler technology," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "Mercury has always been the PowerPC performance leader, and has traditionally only offered its own GNU-based compilers to maximize hardware performance. This decision from the industry performance leader proves conclusively that we have the best PowerPC/AltiVec compilers in the business." "We're always looking for ways to provide our customers with enhanced programmer productivity and performance," said Rich Jaenicke, director of product marketing at Mercury. "We currently offer the Green Hills MULTI IDE and C compiler, and we recently completed benchmark testing of their C and C++ compilers. Their C compiler was at least as fast in all cases and up to 38% faster in some cases than our current optimized GNU based C compiler. We also found the Green Hills C++ compiler to be more standards-compliant than our current offering. We are adding the C++ compiler to the Mercury product portfolio and strongly recommend Green Hills Software's C and C++ compilers and MULTI IDE to our customers as the optimal high performance development environment." Green Hills Software's C/C++ compilers, bundled with the MULTI IDE, take full advantage of the PowerPC's AltiVec parallel processing facilities. The compiler handles all scheduling activity for the PowerPC's integer, floating point, and vector processing units, maximizing efficiency by interleaving instructions between execution units, and rearranging code to hide data load latency. The compiler also analyzes data dependencies and program flow to take advantage of the PowerPC's dual-fetch (for instructions) and out-of-order scheduling abilities, and unrolls loops so that they can be executed in parallel. Green Hills' PowerPC compiler also provides full C/C++ access to the PowerPC's AltiVec extensions, enabling designers to achieve a 2-4x increase in vector processing performance without having to write custom AltiVec assembly code. In addition to boosting performance, Green Hills Software's C/C++ compilers will enable Mercury users to enjoy the full development capabilities of the MULTI IDE, which automates all aspects of software development for PowerPC processors. Featuring a window-oriented editor, RTOS-aware source-level debugger, and graphical program builder, MULTI IDE also includes a run-time error checker, version control system, and performance profiler. For more information visit www.mc.com.