Intel C Compiler

The Intel C / C compiler or shortly ICC is a compiler front ends for C and C , the processor manufacturer Intel provides. Available is the current version 14 of the compiler for the operating systems Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, and processor architectures, IA -32, x86 -64 ( Intel 64, AMD64). IA -64 ( Itanium 2 ) is supported with versions 11.x of the compiler. The product packages Composer are both language-specific and jointly available for C / C and Fortran, and each includes all Intel performance libraries (IPP, MKL, etc.). All of these compilers support OpenMP.

The compilers are compatible with both the GCC and the Microsoft compiler on Windows. You have additional capabilities such as automatic vectorization and support the SIMD instruction set extensions MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4 and AVX.

The Linux license for architectures x86, x64 and IA64 for non-commercial use is free of charge.

Criticism

Optimal performance is obtained only for Intel CPUs. A CPU - dispatch function reads when compiling the CPU vendor string, and create optimized code for Genuine Intel processors, regardless of the actually existing instruction set.

"If the vendor string says" GenuineIntel "then it uses the optimal code path. If the CPU is not from Intel then, in most cases, it will run the slowest possible version of the code, even if the CPU is fully compatible with a better version. "

After Intel 2009 lost a lawsuit against AMD, is executed exhibit this behavior:

"Intel ® compilers, associated libraries and associated development tools or june june not optimize to the same degree for non- Intel microprocessors for optimizations are not unique to Intel did microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel ® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel ® SSE2 ), Intel ® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel ® SSE3 ), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel ® SSSE3 ) instruction sets and other optimizations. "