"The new Intel compiler suite answers a lot of our
questions. For the highly technical Open Source development
community it does raise a modest issue: This compiler itself is not
Open Source. This compiler is the fruit of a great deal of work
conducted at the Intel Microcomputer Software Labs, along with two
prestigious companies recently acquired by Intel: Kuch and
Associates. Nonetheless, the magnitude of the performance
differential in numerically intense applications is such that only
the most dramatic sort of improvement in the long-awaited version 3
of the GNU C/C++ compilerâ€"a "beta" of v3 is included
with the SuSE 7.3 distribution, but gcc v2.95 is installed by
defaultâ€"will stay the hammer that drives a stake
through the fibrillating heart of the aging technology behind the
GNU C compiler. May it rest in peace.
Target specific object code and executable file format
notwithstanding, what really makes the Intel compiler so very
interesting is the fact that it delivers the same instruction
sequences on both Linux and Windows platforms. The differences in
performance across the two operating system platforms are thus
precisely that: differences in the operating systems. That
includes, to some degree, the file formats, as well as the image
activation, scheduling and interrupt interference of the individual
operating systems. As a result, the new Intel compiler affords a
unique opportunity to discover the baseline performance of the raw
systems hardware with superbly optimized code, and to discover the
relative performance differences between Linux and Windows in terms
of the performance they can deliver from the same hardware."
