> My understanding is that for Intel cpus Intel compiler is substantially better than gcc. It's not, except for super specific workloads. Intel's own Intel-CPU

> My understanding is that for Intel cpus Intel compiler is substantially better than gcc. It's not, except for super specific workloads. Intel's own Intel-CPU-optimized distro, Clear Linux, is built mostly with GCC as a conscious performance decision: https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/clear/performance.html#a-benchmark-approach-to-compiler-performance https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/clear/performan... ICC was for a very long time quite superior to MSVC tho.