Anyone here has benchmarked Intel C++ compiler and GCC?

Question

I am not sure whether I should post this question here, because this seems to be a programming-oriented website.

Anyway, I think there must be some gurus here who knows

Answer 1

I used UnixBench (v. 5.1.3) on an openSUSE 12.2 (kernel 3.4.33-2.24-default x86_64), and compiled it first with GCC, and then with Intel's compiler.

With 1 parallel copy, UnixBench compiled with Intel's is about 20% faster than the version compiled with GCC. However this hides huge differences. Dhrystone is about 25% slower with Intel compiler, while Whetstone runs 2x faster.

With 4 copies of UnixBench running in parallel, the improvement of Intel compiler over GCC is only 7%. Again Intel is much better at Whetstone (> 200%), and slower at Dhrystone (about 20%).