Intel Releases V6.0 Compiler Suite

Yokaze writes: "Intels C++ and Fortran compilers are now available for Windows and Linux. The compiler for Linux provides higher compatibility with the GNU C-compiler including compability to the upcoming GCC-3.1 C++-ABI (binary compability) and support for several GNUisms in the syntax (PDF). To quote Intel: 'The 6.0 release of the Intel C++ compiler has improved support for the GNU C language extensions and is now able to build the Linux kernel with minor work arounds for both the IA-32 and Itanium architectures.' Little reminder: Running such a kernel is, of course, not supported by the kernel developers. Evaluation copies are available for download, but requires previous registration."

Comments

Adopt GCC extensions?

[babychess]

Interesting to see their compiler supports GNU C extensions. Usually it's the other way around, free software keeps implementing undocumented extensions. At least the GNU extensions are useful (like 0-sized arrays), and well documented.

It's also interesting that they wrote their own compiler, instead of patching GCC. GCC also works on Windows and 3.1 already has optimizations for different CPU extensions to x86.

They also wrote a new debugger (LDB) specially for Linux, although they claim it implements only a subset of GDB, so what is it for?

And to compile the kernel...who will do that? Is there some server vendor planning to sell Intel servers with such kernels on?

Re:Adopt GCC extensions?

[psavo]

It's also interesting that they wrote their own compiler, instead of patching GCC. GCC also works on Windows and 3.1 already has optimizations for different CPU extensions to x86.

Well, that's mostly sad. They cannot extend gcc, because gcc is under GPL -> they'd have to release the source -> many patented & licensed tricks would be exposed.

And to compile the kernel...who will do that? Is there some server vendor planning to sell Intel servers with such kernels on?

Kernel compiling is pretty much 'fire test'. If they can do that, they can do almost anything (save from mplayer ;). Also, kernel accounts for pretty much system overhead, so speeding kernel up speeds system. especially linux kernel SW RAID, sweet.

The area Intel compiler will shine is all computing -intensive tasks. Like Maya 4, povray, most math libs and stuff. So there is place and _demand_ for it.

I wonder how this code will perform on Athlon/Hammer-32..

Re:Adopt GCC extensions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people may find this interesting: GCC for IA64 Summit Talks about some of the optimization problems with GCC. Here's one juicy bit:

Suneel Jain: Is the goal of having a higher-level tree representation
to do inter-procedural optimizations from information written to
disk?

Mark Mitchell: This question comes up a lot. The sticky issue is that
the FSF is morally opposed to doing this. The aim of the FSF is not
to produce the best compiler, but to convince the world that all
software should be free. The concern is that writing out the
representation to disk would allow a vendor to use a GCC front end,
write the IL to disk, read it back in, and graft proprietary code
into GCC in a sneaky way to get around the GPL. This is a very
firmly held position in the FSF.

Performance?

[4of12]

...able to build the Linux kernel...

So that begs the question: apart from issues of reliability, stability, do the Intel compilers make a Linux system perform better or worse than one built with gcc?

Pretty lame overall.

[Ogerman]

Intel ought to stick with what they do best: designing fast microprocessors. If they could give the gcc folks some tips on improving performance, I think that'd go a lot further for their bottom line then wasting time writing proprietary compilers that only a few companies will use. Do they quite realize the market advantage of having the Open Source community on their side? Heck, I'd quit using AMD processors tomorrow if Intel could squeeze significantly more performance out of their chips in gcc. AMD take note: you guys could be the first to jump on this as well.

Re:Pretty lame overall.

[bstrahm]

Problem is that GCC's top goal isn't maximum performance, it is maximum portability. There are a lot of things you can do if you only have to target one architecture (and trust me Intel is only targetting one architecture) rather than the several dozen that GCC targets...

This said there is a need for both, ultimate portability and ultimate performance. The intel compilers have been delivering ultimate performance on their architecture for years, look at the difference 10 years ago between the MS compiler (internally developed) and the Watcom compiler (Intel License) guess who's compiler produced significantly faster executables...