1.1

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:24:58 -0400 (EDT)
Adam Stylinski <stylinae@...> wrote:
> GCC 4.3 is catching up, but they are no where near utilizing SSE4 or
> SSE5 instructions.  
> 
> http://blog.alphagemini.org/2008/03/icc-vs-gcc-43.html
> 
> He concludes that it's not worth pursuing, but I beg to differ.
> Those are signifcant differences for a processor.

He doesn't establish whether the code in question is highly cpu-bound
or not when run on his system. For a lot of memory- and i/o-bound code,
there's little practical difference between gcc with optimisations
turned off and gcc with -frice-my-shorts except that the former
compiles an order of magnitude faster.

The more interesting question, then, is whether users run any
non-trivial cpu-bound programs. We know the applied science types do,
but they tend to be the ones who're doing clever things with icc
anyway. What about normal users?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh