Probably not, because there are restrictions on what you can do and then sell.sje wrote:As I wrote, I never saw any huge speed increase in spite of considerable experimentation with compiler options. The extra diagnostics were useful even if half of them were spurious to some extent.zullil wrote:The Intel C++ compiler for Mac OS X is available for 30 days at no charge, for evaluation. No submission of marketing data is required.sje wrote:The Intel C++ compiler is available for a limited time free trial if you give them some marketing data, Otherwise it's US$599 plus US$240/year for support.
I tried the free version some time ago. I don't recall any earthshaking improvements over g++, but I do remember that the Intel compiler did supply a few more useful diagnostics about questionable coding.
Chess engine binaries compiled with icc are almost twice as fast as those compiled with gcc, at least on my Mac. For example, I just compiled Smaug221 using both icpc and g++. In a middlegame position with 45 possible moves, the icpc binary examined 1.81M nps, while the g++ binary examined 0.92 M nps.
Your results may vary a bit, but the Intel compiler produces much faster binaries than gcc does.
Also: Apple is spending a lot of R&D budget on speeding up Mac OS/X and the various professional applications it sells. Yet all of these are built with the same gcc tools that Apple ships for free. If the Intel compiler were really that much better, then Apple would use it themselves.
But it is definitely faster. by at _least_ 10%. I have it on every machine I use, as well as the latest gcc. On my laptop I just compared 4.3 against the intel 11.0 compiler, both using PGO (which is broken about 1/2 the time in gcc and causes it to crash, although this version seems to work pretty well). 11.0 is 18% faster than gcc 4.3, for Crafty. 64 bit on fedora 10, core-2 duo 2.0ghz. I could probably test it on our dual quad-core cluster as well, but I suspect it would be the same. BTW 11.0 is about 10% faster than the last 10.x version they released... again for Crafty