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ICC When Intel shipped a compiler that artificially, and purposefully, crippled performance of resulting binaries when run on an AMD CPU. Not what you had in
by dleslie 5y ago
ICC
When Intel shipped a compiler that artificially, and purposefully, crippled performance of resulting binaries when run on an AMD CPU.
Not what you had in mind, but that dirty trick compiler did give Intel an advantage.
- incrudible 5y ago> Not what you had in mind, but that dirty trick compiler did give Intel and advantage. You can only pull off that trick if you already effectively own the market. Otherwise nobody would use your compiler, at least not exclusively.
- rbanffy 5y agoThere were dozens of incidents of compilers that looked for known benchmark code and optimized the hell out of those cases. At the time I remember some debate as to whether it was "fair", on one side people saying it was not, on the other people saying that they actually improved benchmark-like code.
- spijdar 5y agoWhile ICC did do AMD processors dirty by intentionally disabling optimizations that they (technically) supported in a clearly subversive move, this "worked" much better as a tactic because ICC did legitimately produce better code for Intel CPUs than either MSVC or GCC, and can still produce better optimizations. At least years ago, if you really wanted to rice up your system on Gentoo, you'd combine ICC with -O3 and get a small but measurable performance bump.
- gnufx 5y agoThe Intel compiler(s) -- I don't know whether ifort and icc are really distinct -- may produce better code than GCC, and vice versa. The bottom line I got for a set of Fortran benchmarks on SKX was essentially a tie with options as similar as I could make them. (It's a set that seemed to be used for marketing proprietary compilers.) If icc is as reliable as ifort, I wouldn't want to build my OS with it.