it's really hard to create a non-x86 compiler that posts good results on {benchmarks designed to make x86 look good} if you're Intel. When I used Itanium 2 sys

it's really hard to create a non-x86 compiler that posts good results on {benchmarks designed to make x86 look good} if you're Intel. When I used Itanium 2 systems for HPC, Intel's compilers produced the fastest binaries from C and Fortran, at least on the software I used (molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry). What's meant by "benchmarks designed to make x86 look good"? Itanium was introduced against POWER, Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS chips. It was primarily benchmarked for server/workstation applications, where x86 processors weren't the fastest at the time. In 2003 a "Madison" Itanium 2 was significantly faster on numerical simulation code than a contemporary "Gallatin" x86 Xeon.