[Zope-dev] Re: [Zope-Coders] Zope builds (new Intel C++ compiler)

[Matthew T. Kromer]

Morten W. Petersen wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I've just read an article on open-mag:
>
>  http://www.open-mag.com/754088105111.htm
>
>about the new Intel C++ compiler, here are some quotes:
>
>"[...] On SuSE 7.3, the geometric mean performance for our 34 kernels
>soared by 47%. [...] On our Omnibook test platform running Windows XP
>Professional, the performance speedup versus MS Visual C++ 6.0 was not
>quite as dramatic as when running Linux.  Here the improvement was on
>the order of 35%."
>
>I haven't tested it myself (maybe someone else on this list has?) --
>if this compiler produces faster code, would it be possible to
>distribute Zope packages compiled with this compiler ?
>
>Regards,
>
>Morten
>

I tried building a Python with it, and did see some significant 
improvements but I had problems with the shared libraries which I never 
quite got figured out (I didn't spend much time with it, either).

However, I do build Python with gcc 3.1 (cvs) and Python 2.1.2 and with 
various compile options can get a 17% speedup.   gcc's retargetability 
tends to cause problems with its optimiziations; the intermediate 
language form that it uses tends to lose information which machine 
instruction level optimizers need for certain transformations; so most 
of gcc's optimizations tend to be limited in what they can achieve.

Intels compiler will be heavily geared for doing MMX, SSE, SSE2 where it 
can, and using various forms of code motion which eke better performance 
than gcc can.

-- 
Matt Kromer
Zope Corporation  http://www.zope.com/