A month ago Intel announced new versions of its compilers and many are now interested in their relative performance. Besides, we were going to move to the new compiler Visual.NET from the obsolete MSVC 6 long ago.

The SPEC CPU2000 benchmark also changed its version number (though it was yet at the end of 2001 :) from 1.1 to 1.2. That is why today we will have a look at all these news and get prepared for work in 2003.

So, let me remind you what we already have:

• Series iXBT.060202.*: MSVC 6 SP5 and Intel Compilers ver.5. 
• Series iXBT.060602.*: MSVC 6 SP5 and Intel Compilers ver.6. 

Each series has versions regarding SIMD: without them, with MMX, with SSE and with SSE2. Each processor is usually tested on the maximum for it SIMD set. In particular, today all the tests used SSE2. 

Today we add the Intel Compiler 7.0 (both for C/C++ and for Fortran). Besides, together with the MSVC 6 SP5 we will try to use for libraries (the MSVC compiler is actually not used) a new studio version - Microsoft Visual.NET.

So, we have 6 combinations of compilers. All of them were tested on the following PC configuration:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz (FSB 533, L2 512K) 
• ASUS P4T533 (i850E) mainboard
• Samsung RDRAM PC4200 512MB memory 

Other components are not important for the SPEC CPU2000 tests. It can learn about it here.

The system ran under the Windows 2000 Pro SP3. First all the configurations were compiled (the OS was rebooted several times). After that the system was again reinstalled and the tests were started (note that the SPEC CPU2000 doesn't use any system files, that is why it's not necessary to reinstall the OS between separate tests).

On the whole, the scores are higher in the newer version, but inconsiderably:
 

These are the integral scores. If you look at the results of the separate tests, you will notice a greater difference. In particular, the transition to the Visual.NET comes to about 5 % in two subtests of CINT2000 and in CFP2000/183.equake the growth is over 13%. At the same time, for the CFP2000/188.ammp the scores fall down by almost 7%.

As to the new version 1.2, it supports several new operating systems and has corrections in the sources for better compatibility with various compilers. When we worked on this article, we had some problems with the benchmarks compilation for Linux which were resolved with the newer benchmark versions. So, this comparison is just formal (iXBT.060602.sse2.cfg configuration).
 

Conclusion

So, we have two interesting results.

First of all, with the new compilers the integral scores grow up. If every per cent of performance is vital for you, you should certainly try the 7th version of the Intel's compiler together with the Microsoft Visual.NET. Note that the performance can increase by 5% and over on one application only. 

On the other hand, the difference is so slight that in future we will be able to use only new compilers and compare the scores with those obtained last year on the old configurations. It also refers to the SPEC CPU2000 version.