StackOverflow2013

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copied!<p>The Intel compiler is one of the most advanced C++ compiler available, it has a number of advantages over for instance the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, and one major drawback. The advantages include:</p> <ul> <li><p>Very good SIMD support, as far as I've been able to find out, it is the compiler that has the best support for SIMD instructions.</p></li> <li><p>Supports both automatic parallelization (multi core optimzations), as well as manual (through OpenMP), and does both very well.</p></li> <li><p>Support CPU dispatching, this is really important, since it allows the compiler to target the processor for optimized instructions when the program runs. As far as I can tell this is the only C++ compiler available that does this, unless G++ has introduced this in their yet.</p></li> <li><p>It is often shipped with optimized libraries, such as math and image libraries.</p></li> </ul> <p>However it has one major drawback, the dispatcher as mentioned above, only works on Intel CPU's, this means that advanced optimizations will be left out on AMD cpu's. There is a workaround for this, but it is still a major problem with the compiler.</p> <p>To work around the dispatcher problem, it is possible to replace the dispatcher code produced with a version working on AMD processors, one can for instance use <a href="http://agner.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Agner Fog's</a> <a href="http://www.agner.org/optimize/asmlib.zip" rel="nofollow noreferrer">asmlib library</a> which replaces the compiler generated dispatcher function. Much more information about the dispatching problem, and more detailed technical explanations of some of the topics can be found in the <a href="http://agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Optimizing software in C++</a> paper - also from Anger (which is really worth reading).</p> <p>On a personal note I have used the Intel c++ Compiler with Visual Studio 2005 where it worked flawlessly, I didn't experience any problems with microsoft specific language extensions, it seemed to understand those I used, but perhaps the ones mentioned by <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1982178/intel-c-compiler-as-an-alternative-to-microsofts/1982283#1982283">John Knoeller</a> were different from the ones I had in my projects.</p> <p>While I like the Intel compiler, I'm currently working with the microsoft C++ compiler, simply because of the financial extra investment the Intel compiler requires. I would only use the Intel compiler as an alternative to Microsofts or the GNU compiler, if performance were critical to my project and I had a the financial part in order ;)</p>

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