Intel C++ Compiler - Overview

Overview

The compilers generate code for IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures and certain non-Intel but compatible processors, such as certain AMD processors. A specific release of the compiler (11.1) is available for development of Linux-based applications for IA-64 (Itanium 2) processors.

The 13.0 release adds support for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. It continues support for automatic vectorization, which can generate SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, AVX and AVX2 SIMD instructions, and the embedded variant for Intel MMX and MMX 2. Use of such instruction through the compiler can lead to improved application performance in some applications as run on IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures, compared to applications built with compilers that do not support these instructions.

Intel compilers continue support for Intel Cilk Plus, which is a capability for writing vectorized and parallel code that can be used on IA-32 and Intel 64 processors or which can be offloaded to Xeon Phi coprocessors. They also continue support for OpenMP 3.1, symmetric multiprocessing, automatic parallelization, and Guided Auto-Parallization (GAP). With the add-on Cluster OpenMP capability, the compilers can also automatically generate Message Passing Interface calls for distributed memory multiprocessing from OpenMP directives.

Intel C++ is compatible with Microsoft Visual C++ on Windows and integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio. On Linux and OS X, it is compatible with GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the GNU toolchain. Intel compilers are known for the application performance they can enable as measured by benchmarks, such as the SPEC CPU benchmarks.