Why don't they improve GCC to have a 8-9 to 40% performance gain? it's not like intel has some kind of secret magical piece of code that lets them have a better compiler.
Why don't they improve GCC to have a 8-9 to 40% performance gain? it's not like intel has some kind of secret magical piece of code that lets them have a better compiler.
To a large extent, they have. ICC really no longer has the performance lead that it once did over gcc. There was absolutely a time when the difference was consistent, and significant. But, a lot has changed since gcc 2.95, when egcs existed. The 4.x branch in particular has been about improving the optimisation capabilities of the compiler. These days, I generally reccomend just going with gcc to anybody who asks me.
Depends on the CPU... gcc has reasonable performance on x86, but on ia64 or ppc the vendor supplied compilers have a big advantage. even on x86 icc leads by a considerable margin in some areas, especially on very new processors.
GCC compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GCC compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
To a large extent, they have. ICC really no longer has the performance lead that it once did over gcc. There was absolutely a time when the difference was consistent, and significant. But, a lot has changed since gcc 2.95, when egcs existed. The 4.x branch in particular has been about improving the optimisation capabilities of the compiler. These days, I generally reccomend just going with gcc to anybody who asks me.
Re:GCC compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the CPU... gcc has reasonable performance on x86, but on ia64 or ppc the vendor supplied compilers have a big advantage. even on x86 icc leads by a considerable margin in some areas, especially on very new processors.