Re: intel's Linux compiler w/ Debian
On Saturday 03 August 2002 09:49, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 10:35:54PM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> > > Not so - AMD Palominos and Thuroughbreds support all of the Intel
> > > instructions and, naturally enough, the AMD chips are faster even with
> > > the Intel compiler.. Intel is .. displeased by this.
> >
> > wow. I was under the impression Intel's compiler did better work using
> > their knowledge of the pipelines and what not.
>
> You'd think, wouldn't you? As I said, Intel is Not Happy about this turn
> of events. Of course, the benchmarking and comparison was done using
> Intel's win32 compiler, but I doubt their Linux compiler is all that
> significantly different a beast.
>
> > Either way gcc works just fine at $0 whereas the Intel is $399.
>
> I'll drink to that!
I think the $0 personal use icc is great too..
Btw. there is one case where the intel compiler creater "better" binaries from
Intel CPU's than AMD.
The Intel compiler has the unique ability to make conditional optimization. In
other words if your processor has MMX it activates the MMX-optimized parts of
the code, and it you have SSE it activates the SSE-optimized parts, and if
you have neither it uses the normally optimized code. That is, that is what
it is _supposed_ to do according to documentation. In fact the optimized
parts are only used if your processor supports it AND is an Intel processor.
For this reason this feature is complety useless for honorable projects.
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