Author: Bo Persson
Date: 07:36:59 08/14/03
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On August 14, 2003 at 04:06:10, martin fierz wrote: >hi, > >i've often been wondering how large the differences between compilers are. does >anybody have or know of a comparison of C compiler .exe speeds for >chess-relevant integer performance? e.g. crafty compiled with different >compilers run on the same machine? > >i'm asking because a fellow checkers programmer has claimed the metroworks >compiler (which i don't know myself) produces much (60%!) faster code than the >microsoft compiler - and i'm kind of sceptic about that. in my experience, the >MS compiler is a bit slower than the intel compiler, but not much (~10%); and >it's a bit faster than GCC, but again not that much (again ~10%). i certainly >always thought of it as a very good compiler. > >any numbers anyone? > >cheers > martin Nobody bites on this one? :-) I'll give it a try: To be 60% faster, the program must do something that a particular compiler is *very* good at. I bet this is extremely unusual. I agree that the MS and Intel compilers produce code that is typically 10-20% faster than GCC. Which one of those is the fastest depends on the code, and possibly on whether the code is particularly tuned for one of them. I have used MSVC for a long time, so my program is probably sort of adapted to that specific compiler. I haven't compared the speed for a couple of years, so my figures are for version 6.0 of both. Anyway, compiling my program with the default settings for the Intel compiler made it run about 30% *slower* than normal. Improving the compiler options improved this, but it was still 15% slower. I guess that profiled optimizations and some additional tuning could possibly get me back the remaining 15%, but I didn't really try that too hard. Couldn't see that it was worth the $500 in my case. :-) Others have reported the opposite result, with the Intel compiler producing slightly faster code, but never any 60%. Bo Persson bop2@telia.com
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