While the Intel compiler may be better in some/many cases, it is not universal. In my experience (a couple of years ago, C++ code, high-performance requirements

While the Intel compiler may be better in some/many cases, it is not universal. In my experience (a couple of years ago, C++ code, high-performance requirements), the Intel compiler was quite a bit worse than GCC for code with a lot of branches and abstraction layers. The Microsoft compiler was way better than both. Around 10% faster run-time IIRC.