icpc compiler

[rbarreira]

Icc works fine for me - in fact it is able to compile Arasan with PGO, which gcc has never been able to do. But I have found that runtime performance is no better than gcc 4.6 with -O3. YMMV though.

Same conclusion with Critter:

ICC 32 bit = 1127 knps
GCC 32 bit = 1110 knps

ICC 64 bit = 1763 knps
GCC 64bit = 1777 knps

I think gcc 4.5 and 4.6 were a significant improvement in terms of optimizations, and in my experiments icc's advantage is now much smaller or non-existent. Which is awesome because icc has the big disadvantage of generating crappy code for AMD CPUs and/or generating executables that just refuse to run on AMD CPUs even if they could (depending on the options given to icc).