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I have been hearing about the superiority of Intel's compiler for a couple of decades now. Back when GCC was a tiny baby compared to what it is now, and when Clang/LLVM didn't even exist.

I wonder if this Intel compiler 'superiority' is still the case today, or if this is just a meme at this point.

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For matrix manipulation based Fortran scientific codes, ifort/MKL can give +30% compared to gfortran. It's difficult to disentangle where the speedup comes from, but certainly as jedbrown aludes to, the Intel compilers seem to make a better go of poorly optimised / badly written code.

For C based software, its a much closer run thing, and often sticking with GCC avoids weird segfaults when mixing Intel and GCC-compiled Linux libraries.

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