I just got interested and did a test myself. Comparing gcc 4.0 (-O2 -funroll-loops -D__NO_MATH_INLINES -ffast-math -march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -ftree-vectorize) and icc 9.0 beta (-O3 -xW -ip): gcc 4.0 icc 9.0 Composite Score: 543.65 609.20 FFT Mflops: 313.71 318.29 SOR Mflops: 441.96 426.32 MonteCarlo: Mflops: 105.68 71.20 Sparse matmult Mflops: 574.88 891.65 LU Mflops: 1282.00 1338.56
which looks not too bad ;) Richard.