Yesterday I saw a piece of news about the progress of the LinuxDNA group. I’m not using Linux right now, but I used to, and if you know anything about it, you know that GCC is everywhere. The kernel and the vast majority of all the GNU applications have been designed to be compiled with GCC. The LinuxDNA group has been working to bring the power of Intel C/C++ Compiler to Linux.

Recently they have been capable of compile the kernel in a Gentoo. According to their data, compiling the kernel with the Intel Compiler boosts up to 40% for certain parts and an average of 8.5%.

I don’t have an extensive knowledge about compilers, but it sounds to me like a good research without practical use. Don’t take this wrong, it’s an amazing work, I’m just saying that I don’t think this will make a difference in our machines performance.

We’re using GCC because it’s extremely portable. You can cross-compile whatever you want, and you can use it to compile all your system for a bunch of different architectures. With Intel Compiler we will boost our system around 8.5%, but only for those who run Intel processors… even AMD is out of the target!

In my opinion, we should wait until more performance date will be available and then, think if it’s worth.

Be that as it may, it’s a great research and another option to boost up our system