Intel Releases Compiler Suite 7.0

Yokaze writes "Intel boosts its Pentium 4 and Itanium 2 and released Version 7 of its compiler suite. On the Windows side, there is the plugin compability to the .NET enviroment, on the Linux side better compability to the GNU compiler, including the Common C++ ABI.
As usual, there are 30-days evaluation copies and for Linux an unsupported non-commercial version after previous registration at the Intel Evaluation Centre. According to the comments published by Intel marketing, Dr. Fons Rademakers, CERN, claims high compability with GCC 3.2 and a performance increase of up to 30% on their code (The ROOT System)."

Comments

Re:Doubtful

[selectspec]

gcc in some areas produces slower code than the native compilers.

The fact is that gcc is designed for cross platform compilation and the native compilers are not. The abstract tree approach to gcc's design is somewhat limiting for some arch specific operations, and certainly adds complexity to the compiler development process.

Also, Intel and Sun have spent many millions of dollars on their compilers over the years. You get what you pay for.

However, I would hesistate to use the intel or sun compiler for a project.

Using a platform specific compiler ties your project down to a single architecture, defeating one of the major purposes of C/C++.

A far better approach, if practical, is to isolate the real performance sucking areas (encryption, xor routines, float ops, etc), and write these sections in assembly. Those sections will become platform specific, but will smoke any compiler output.