Red Flag announces an Intel-compiled distribution

Red Flag announces an Intel-compiled distribution

It's ok, I'm one of the sensible Gentoo folk. :-)

I can imagine a really good compiler will have an apreciable effect on some C code, but most system software isn't that CPU bound. I imagine there are some inner loops in the kernel that could benefit. But in general I'd be suprised if there were much benefit (just like those Gentoo CFLAGS).

Of course the kernel has no floating point which is where ICC has it's big advantage over GCC at the moment. I believe recent gcc's do make use of SSE floating point but not vectorising/SIMD like ICC can do.

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