Intel Software Development Tools Beta for Mac OS

Thanks for the kind words, Brad. Yes, I and my teammates are the ones behind Intel Fortran for OS X.

I remember back in 1997 when we introduced Digital Visual Fortran to a platform that was new to us - Windows. We had a lot to learn, but our efforts were obviously appreciated. We hope to repeat the success on the Mac platform.

As part of the deal of a few years ago where Intel essentially subsumed the old DEC Alpha chip, Intel got the DEC Fortran technology and engineers. DEC Fortran hands down outperforms any other compiler you can find. If Steve Lionel et al are involved in the Intel Fortran for OS X then Apple may pick up a large chunk of the scientific workstation market.

Xcode allows you to specify pretty much everything in a Make-like way, including which compiler to use (and linker, and parser, etc, etc).

The Linux Intel C++ compiler is based on the EDG front end (the company for which I work; www.edg.com). I'm pretty sure their MacOS X front end is the same thing. (The front end is the part that scans the source code and determines what it means; the back end is the part that generates code after performing all sorts of optimizations.)

As many mentioned, Intel's back end is known to squeeze more performance out of Intel CPUs than the GNU compiler. In general, for CPU-bound applications, this may be no more than a 10-20% improvement, but for some codes it could be much more dramatic (more likely for apps that spend most time on small code fragments that are particularly sensitive to instruction scheduling choices).

However, on the front end side, I believe the Intel C/C++ compiler can be run in a fully standard-compliant mode (the GNU compiler cannot). In fact, EDG had to go out of its way to emulate GNU bugs (that are relied on in various code bases). If you care about cross-compiler portability, that could be important. I believe the current Intel C/C++ compiler also compiles code a little faster than the current GNU C/C++ compiler, but I'm not positive about that.

As stated, most hardware company compilers are much
faster than GCC. Just as an example, the Sun Solaris
CC generates code that's on the average 20-30% faster
than GCC on my work projects.

Also can help speed up OSX86 ports of PC software in
some cases, or make concurrent releases easier.

Finally someone has managed to combine Fortran and Mac OS X!

They should be fired.

Is it possible to work with xcode so that it will work with different compilers (like gcc and the intel compilers) so that it could, for example, use gcc to compile the PowerPC part of your unified binary and the intel compiler to compile the x86 part of the unified binary?

Jason

I would assume using Intel's C compiler on Intel would have the same advantage as using IBM's XL c compiler on PowerPC versus Apple's gcc.

As teece hinted at, Intel's compiler is known for generating extremely fast code compared to gcc.

"... advantages of using an Intel C compiler versus using gcc on OS X? Would the advantages be arbitrary or based on coding style?"

Performance. Intel native compilers generally outperform GCC by a great margin. GCC is known for having a compiler that runs on a lot of platforms, but not for its great optimizations. Intel can make specific optimizations for its chips, and ignore all the other architectures that GCC has to support. Regardless of coding style, it will give improved performance.