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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Except fun like..

Intel controls the compilers. The compilers can do special things on Intel and make better code.

Just having a faster processor doesn't matter if most compiled code is slower on your processor...

Intel has their own compiler(s) but at least on the server side where everything is compiled using gcc or LLVM, both are optimized for both AMD and Intel. Was AMD behind a year ago in this regard? Yes. Even Windows just finally got more optimizations.

On the other hand, the benchmarks with AMD in the lead are obviously using compilers that 'exist' so really the compiler advantage Intel 'may' have is already taken into account. Additionally, the last few years of security issues has shaved off an additional 3% to 20% off of Intel's performance (compared to the 2-5% AMD lost).

The effect is that Intel has been loosing from both directions allowing AMD to be outpacing them in many ways.

Yup, which is fantastic.

I was pointing out that it takes more than an equal or better product at an equal or lesser price, due to many things baked into the current state of computers / servers.

Almost no one uses Intel's compiler for serious workloads afaik. Your entire point is irrelevant.

Gentoo used to have an article on it on the old Wiki

Of course it was riddled with (outdated) lists of packages that either

A: ran worse than with GCC (this was pre-Clang/LLVM days)

B: Didn't build at all

"The compilers", in plurality? They obviously control their own Intel C++ and Fortran compilers, but is there evidence of them "controlling" any others?

It's not like GCC or LLVM are blind to uarch differences.

Last I checked benchmarking tools are assembled by compilers instead of by hand so the supposed Intel advantage there is already baked into the results.

Yup. But do you use benchmarks all day on your computer, or do you use applications? Which compiler are those applications compiled with?

Linux apps are clang & GCC, macs use clang, windows is clang, gcc, and Microsoft's compilers. AFAIK, icc is pretty small in market share.

You think msvc, gcc and clang all have special optimizations for intel? Intel only controls their own compiler, icc.

GCC has `-march` and `-mtune` flags for arch-specific optimizations. Just because the compiler is agnostic doesn't mean it can't have, or welcome, arch-specific optimizations.

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