I listened to an interesting CPPCast episode where they interviewed someone from Intel's compiler team. (I'm just guessing that a lot of the benefit here comes

I listened to an interesting CPPCast episode where they interviewed someone from Intel's compiler team. (I'm just guessing that a lot of the benefit here comes from building with Intel's compiler rather than GCC.) It sounded like the bulk of the benefits they get are just from using profile-guided optimization to maximize the cache-friendliness of the code. I would guess those kinds of optimizations are readily portable to any CPU with a similar layout and cache sizes. I would not expect, though, that they are actively detrimental (compared to whatever the official sklearn builds are doing) on CPUs that have a different cache layout.