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Is ifort "big business" in terms of direct revenues from sales of the compiler or because it makes Intel hardware a faster platform for HPC?
by Bostonian 7y ago
Is ifort "big business" in terms of direct revenues from sales of the compiler or because it makes Intel hardware a faster platform for HPC?
- cultus 7y agoBoth. They are able to optimize things on Intel processors that no one else since they are the ones that make the processors and have more proprietary information and such. It's closed-source freeware but they make money on support.
- Someone 7y agoLet’s say your hardware cost $1 million. Then, a compiler that brings you a 1% speed increase compared to a free one should be break-even at a license price of $10,000, possibly more if you factor in the cost to run that machine. $1 million computers are rare, but not that rare (The fastest in the top-500 cost over $100 million), so, _if_ you can build a compiler that consistently does that, there should be a profitable business there. I would think margins on CPU sales and on consulting would dwarf that 1% margin, though. Because of that, I think it’s more “winning the benchmarks game, because that’s what sells hardware there” then revenues from compiler sales that keeps intel’s compiler alive.