Intel Parallel Studio for free?

Freebie! What a disturbing word, or rather a thought. From this thought, the heart begins to beat a little more, and the brain rapidly makes arithmetic calculations. This feeling is familiar to me, especially when I bought a 16-gigabyte usb-flash drive from a famous manufacturer in one of the American Volmarts for only $ 19.99. I even wanted to take two, but changed my mind. Now I gave this one to my friend as I don’t need it at all. However, the “feeling of deep satisfaction” from what I managed to acquire a “useful” device at a price two times less than it could be found here, and a half, compared to the usual American prices, remains.

Now let's talk about free software. This year I read quite a lot of seminars on various tools of Intel, but special attention, of course, is paid to the “aggressive promotion” of our new product for C / C ++ developers on Windows to the market: Intel Parallel Studio . And I increasingly hear the question: why would Intel not distribute Parallel Studio for free, or give it to the loadable MS VS? It should be noted that such a question is asked not at all from the desire to simply get the tool for free, but because of the correct understanding of the reasons why Intel is developing software. Let's see what are the reasons, and what is needed to be understood.

It is no secret that the main source of income for Intel is selling microprocessors. Whatever they say, it’s not so easy to sell an Intel microprocessor, few people want to overpay for a brand when there are very good products from competitors. And those who are interested in special features of Intel's processors, such as the SSE4.2 or a thousand performance counters, are even less. So it is necessary to help processors sell, and one of the right approaches is the so-called enabling, that is, making something possible. In this regard, Intel has a huge division called SSG (Software and Services Group), which will be mainly engaged in this very “enibling”, helping a fairly large number of companies modify / optimize their software so that it will work much faster on Intel processors and more efficiently. Such work cannot be imagined without software tools, compilers, analyzers, profilers, and so on. At the same time, the field of application of these tools has long gone beyond optimization for Intel chips. For example, the Intel compiler generates code that runs on AMD processors no slower than programs compiled by other compilers. Approximately the same situation with Parallel Studio - there are no restrictions for its use with non-Intel processors, neither technical nor marketing. Intel is interested in the universal and final victory of the development trend of multi-core processors, and the fact that Parallel Studio is used on platforms with competing processors does not confuse anyone.
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Thus, we see that the software produced in SSG helps to sell microprocessors, that is, to earn Intel profits. One may argue about the profitability of software units, but the obvious and transparent financial statements suggest that the main money brings all the same "hardware". But if this is the case, why not just donate and distribute software to everyone for free, like, for example, our green friends come in with Catalist?

It's all about the psychology of the industry. A decent company is unlikely to include a program in its “tool park” that is distributed free of charge, except for research purposes only. This is a stereotype: free software (not to be confused with open source) is unsupported programs written by a handful of enthusiasts, or a research project whose prospects are vague, and therefore it does not make sense to adapt it to your development process. It does not matter that it is provided by a large and well-known kompaliya - any company has limited resources, and sooner or later, they will cease to be engaged and supported.
If the manufacturer takes payment for the software, then he assumes some responsibility for maintenance, user support, updating versions, expanding functionality, fixing bugs, etc. For their money, the customer has the right to rely on a roadmap and product prospects. The higher the cost of software, the stronger must "lick" the user, including by offering various services.

SSG hopes that Parallel Studio will become a “standard environment” for developers of multi-threaded applications, on a par with Microsoft VS, so it tries to create some kind of understandable tool infrastructure and build a support model as close as possible to most users ( forums ). And the price was most likely formed like this: marketers slapped a finger and put market offers to the wind, and then they decided that the normal price for any component in the package would be about $ 399, but for wholesale buyers (the entire Intel Parallel Studio is completely ) $ 799 and a poster on the wall as a gift. Of course, there are also academic programs (software is two times cheaper) and loyalty programs (when companies get free software for regularly using our new products and send reports on bugs and suggestions for improving usability).

Is this price free? Compared to “free,” of course not. Would I buy Intel Parallel Studio for myself, play around and “polish” written programs at leisure? Most likely not, since in this case I would use MS Visual C ++ Express Edition, and Parallel Studio will not be installed with it. Would I convince my superiors in a software company developing C ++ projects to go broke for a couple of licenses? Definitely yes! And you?