Intel C++ smokes gcc
Source: OpenMag.com
Very few technologies excite the dyed-in-the-wool techie as much as a new compiler. There’s something very heady about the feeling that your code is driving the hardware to new heights. Add to that the thought of all that technological power behind the deceptively simple “build” button or “make” command. Whatever the motivation, there is no doubt that technology thrill seekers will marvel at the new Intel C/C++ compiler. And for serious old-line number crunching applications, Intel has a Fortran compiler which employs the same optimization techniques.
On a more prosaic plane, Linux ISVs whose software products are computationally intense, such as 3D graphics rendering, will garner an enormous efficiency boost in performance on both single and multiprocessor systems. Performance improvements of the order of 30% or more are naturally of a high order of importance. When they come with a simple recompile they can be a godsend.
For a long time, OpenBench Labs has measured a substantial difference in CPU performance between Linux and Windows 2000 systems using our CPU benchmark suite of 34 kernels. While there was a decided improvement with the introduction of the Linux 2.4 kernel, there was never any doubt that the Microsoft Visual Studio and the GNU C compilers where generating substantially different code. That fact alone muddied any performance comparison.
