Would it not be in Intel's best interest to have popular compilers be able to squeeze the most performance out of its own line of CPUs?
I'm wondering how the incentives play out to keep this stuff private?
I'm wondering how the incentives play out to keep this stuff private?
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/n...
I think software is not a huge profit center for them.
The original comment presents:
> The actual details there are [1] too secret for Intel to want to accurately describe them in gcc, [2] they’re different across different CPUs, [3] and compilers just aren’t as good as you think they are.
2 and 3 could just be the whole story. Although we haven't actually accumulated any evidence here for 3, given that the original story was about surprisingly getting beat by a compiler, despite performing a seemingly obvious optimization.
Actually, compiler optimizations like scheduling tend to be neutral to negative on x86 because they increase register pressure. You’d probably want to do “anti-scheduling” and hope the CPU decoder takes care of it if anything.
Interesting that it generates suboptimal code for non-Intel processors.