Intel is not the market leader in compilers, however: It is somewhat rare to come across teams using the Intel compiler, and they tend to be in niche modeling/s

Intel is not the market leader in compilers, however: It is somewhat rare to come across teams using the Intel compiler, and they tend to be in niche modeling/simulation or financial realms, more often than not with the sort of code that you compile for a specific piece of deployment hardware, compiling again when you move it to something different. Intel makes the ICC seemingly to try to encourage the adoption of newer features in newer processors -- multi-threading for many-core processors, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, AVX, AVX2, soon AVX-512, etc. It is worth noting that simply using a feature (e.g. SSE, AVX) because it is there does not guarantee performance improvements in all scenarios -- the ICC uses specific model timings to make some of its choices. The obvious solution for this problem is to never have a reason to use the ICC compiler. For the auto-vectorization and use of things like AVX be as advanced in gcc, llvm, and even the Microsoft compiler.