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While ICC did do AMD processors dirty by intentionally disabling optimizations that they (technically) supported in a clearly subversive move, this "worked" muc

While 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 ago
The 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.