Intel Announces Free Linux Compilers

gobbles writes: "Intel has just announced free (as in beer) C/C++ and FORTRAN compilers for Linux. With support for OpenMP and Pentium 3, 4 and Itanium optimizations, this is a winner - suddenly Intel hardware becomes a whole lot more attractive for Linux developers. For those with Pentium 4 or Itanium systems, performance gains of 50% or more are just waiting to be had! Grab the compilers here and take 'em for a spin! Athlon owners need not apply."

Comments

what about gcc?

[ksheff]

Since Intel is primarily in the business of selling hardware, why don't they take some of this technology and help speed up gcc? This might help them win back some linux users who switched to AMD.

licensing sucks

[selectspec]

What a piece of shit license. The free license is only for non-comercial use.

Re:licensing sucks

[Grond]

"What a piece of shit license. The free license is only for non-comercial use."

That's because Intel makes good money selling its compiler as an MSVC++ plugin. Be glad that they are offering what is by far the best IA32 compiler as a free Linux program. Anyway, to my knowledge you can't get the Windows version for free, even for non-commercial use.

Might also benefit Athlon

[vrt3]

When reading this article I remembered a story on Tom's hardware, a few weeks after the introduction of the Pentium IV. Tom had posted benchmarks that showed bad performance for the Pentium IV; a few Intel engineers reacted by providing code compiled with Intel compilers with Intel optimizations.

This improved the Pentium IV results significantly, but, surprisingly, it also improved the Athlon performance. View the results here.

Re:Wow

[Teferi]

Isn't obj-prelink somewhat GCC-specific?