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Intel Releases Compiler Suite 7.0

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-really-want-to-pay-money dept.

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)."

10 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by bic2k · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just downloaded the new intel compiler for windows. Tested it with a opengl application I made that runs really slow. The difference between the microsoft c++ compiler and the intel one is about 15%. Not quite 30%, but that probably applies to particular situations...

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  2. Re:Doubtful by jericho4.0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As I understand it, Intels compilers kisk ass. Faster compilations, faster code, smaller code, etc. Not to knok a great product in GCC, but Intels engineers are no slouches.

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    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  3. Gentoo support? by crow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What would be really cool would be if a source distribution like Gentoo would support this in addition to gcc. Perhaps they could set it up to first try building with the Intel compiler, and if any errors show up, then try with gcc. It would certainly be interesting to see how well such a system would run.

    1. Re:Gentoo support? by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's not in CVS yet (server down, other issues), but Linux from Scratch builds GCC 3.2.1 for most people out of the box with the same commands as 3.2. Also, many have reported that they have built LFS with glibc 2.3.1, and have experienced huge speed increases. I know a few on the IRC channels who have successfully built glibc 2.3.1 with no changes to the commands used in LFS 4.0. Note that GCC 3.2.1 is required for glibc 2.3.1.

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    2. Re:Gentoo support? by photon317 · · Score: 4, Informative


      Gentoo has a package for icc, as well as gcc. BTW they had a working autobuild for gcc 3.2.1 two days before the slashdot announcement of the release :)

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      11*43+456^2
  4. Intel's Linux compiler with Debian by benjamindees · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I just finished reading this interesting thread on the Debian developers' mailing list. They discuss all aspects of the Intel compiler, including AMD support, possibly adding packages to Debian non-free, and (most interestingly) using icc to compile Debian binaries for distribution.

    There are several speculative "requests" for a donation of a license to Debian for this purpose as well as a plea to Intel to release the suite in .deb format instead of just RPM. All in all it was an interesting read.

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  5. AMD by Per+Wigren · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How much faster will it be on AMD processors then?

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  6. Building the kernel with it by SweenyTod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is GCC still the only compiler that can build the linux kernel sucessfully?

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    1. Re:Building the kernel with it by Ryu2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's doubtful that compiling any OS kernel with Intel's compiler will result in significant speed increases. Most architectural optimizations that the Intel compilers make that gcc doesn't lie in the area of SIMD instructions, and instruction scheduling to maximize pipelining, parallelism, etc. It will be very useful in areas such as graphics, multimedia, other heavy-duty computation, and the like, but not in a general purpose OS, where the instructions are mainly loads and stores of data.

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  7. Re:Doubtful by selectspec · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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