Intel® C++ Compiler Professional Edition offers the best support for creating multi-threaded applications. Only the Professional Edition offers the breadth of advanced optimization, multi-threading, and processor support that includes automatic processor dispatch, vectorization, auto-parallelization, OpenMP*, data prefetching, and loop unrolling, along with highly optimized C++ templates for parallelism, math processing, and multimedia libraries.

The Professional Edition combines a high performance compiler, which now includes support for Debian* and Ubuntu*, with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB), Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) and Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL). While these libraries are available separately, the Professional Edition creates a strong foundation for building robust, high performance parallel code at significant price savings.

New – Intel® Compiler Suite Professional Edition for Linux. This suite includes all the features of the Intel C++ Compiler Professional Edition, but also includes the Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux for a more complete solution at significant price savings.

The Standard Edition compiler has the same performance and features as the Professional Edition compiler, but does not provide the multi-threaded libraries.

Advanced Optimization Features

Software compiled using the Intel C++ Compiler for Linux benefits from advanced optimization features, a few of which are explained briefly here, with links to more complete descriptions:

·         Multi-Threaded Application Support, including OpenMP and auto-parallelization for simple and efficient software threading.

·         Auto-vectorization parallelizes code to utilize the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instruction set architectures (SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, and SSE4) of our latest processors.

·         High-Performance Parallel Optimizer (HPO) restructures and optimizes loops to ensure that auto-vectorization, OpenMP, or auto-parallelization best utilizes the processor’s capabilities for cache and memory accesses, SIMD instruction sets, and for multiple cores. This revolutionary capability, new in version 10, combines vectorization, parallelization and loop transformations into a single pass which is faster, more effective and more reliable than prior discrete phases.

·         Interprocedural Optimization (IPO) dramatically improves performance of small- or medium-sized functions that are used frequently, especially programs that contain calls within loops. The analysis capabilities of this optimizer can also give feedback on vulnerabilities and coding errors, such as uninitialized variables or OpenMP API issues, which cannot be detected as well by compilers which rely strictly on analysis by a compiler front-end.

·         Profile-guided Optimization (PGO) improves application performance by reducing instruction-cache thrashing, reorganizing code layout, shrinking code size, and reducing branch mispredictions.

·         Optimized Code Debugging with the Intel® Debugger improves the efficiency of the debugging process on code that has been optimized for Intel® architecture.

Eclipse* IDE Integration

Eclipse integration, in addition to command line, is available for Linux on Intel® Itanium® processors.

·         The Intel C++ Compiler for Linux ships with a copy of the powerful and popular Eclipse open-source IDE.

·         The compiler can be invoked from within Eclipse, as well as by using the command-line interface.

·         Eclipse integration augments the use of the Intel C++ Compiler for Linux with other tools you may already use, such as make, Emacs, and gdb.

The Intel C++ Compiler for Linux builds on a winning foundation. Position yourself to create next-generation software for next-generation hardware.The following features are new since version 9 of the compiler.

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System Requirements

Processor Terminology
Intel compilers support three platforms: general combinations of processor and operating system type. This section explains the terms that Intel uses to describe the platforms in its documentation, installation procedures and support site.

IA-32 architecture - IA-32 architecture refers to systems based on 32-bit processors supporting at least the Pentium® II instruction set, (for example, Intel® Core™ architecture-based processor or Intel® Xeon® processor), or processors from other manufacturers supporting the same instruction set, running a 32-bit operating system ("Linux x86").

Intel® 64 architecture - Intel 64 architecture refers to systems based on IA-32 architecture-based processors which have 64-bit architectural extensions, (for example, Intel® Core™2 processor family or Intel Xeon processor), running a 64-bit operating system ("Linux x86_64"). If the system is running a 32-bit version of the Linux operating system, then IA-32 architecture applies instead. Systems based on the AMD Athlon64* and Opteron* processors running a 64-bit operating system are also supported by Intel compilers for Intel 64 architecture-based applications.

IA-64 architecture - Refers to systems based on the Intel Itanium 2 processor running a 64-bit operating system.

Native and Cross-Platform Development
The term "native" refers to building an application that will run on the same platform that it was built on, for example, building on IA-32 architecture to run on IA-32 architecture. The term "cross-platform" or "cross-compilation" refers to building an application on a platform type different from the one on which it will be run, for example, building on IA-32 architecture to run on IA-64 architecture. Not all combinations of cross-platform development are supported, and some combinations may require installation of optional tools and libraries.

The following list describes the supported combinations of compilation host (system on which you build the application) and application target (system on which the application runs).

·         IA-32 architecture host - Supported target: IA-32 architecture

·         Intel 64 architecture host - Supported targets: IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures

·         IA-64 architecture host - Supported target: IA-64 architecture

Note: Development for a target different from the host may require optional library components to be installed from your Linux Distribution.

·         Requirements to develop IA-32 architecture-based applications

·         Requirements to develop applications for processors that support Intel 64 architecture or for AMD Opteron Processors

·         Requirements to develop IA-64 architecture-based applications

Requirements to develop IA-32 architecture-based applications

Requirements to develop applications for processors that support Intel 64 architecture or for AMD Opteron processors

Requirements to develop IA-64 architecture-based applications

Note on gcc Versions
The Intel compilers are tested with a number of different Linux distributions, with different versions of gcc. Some Linux distributions may contain header files different from those we have tested, which may cause problems. The version of glibc you use must be consistent with the version of gcc in use.

Notes:

The above lists of processor model names are not exhaustive - other processor models correctly supporting the same instruction set as those listed are expected to work. Please contact Intel® Premier Support if you have questions regarding a specific processor model

Some optimization options have restrictions regarding the processor type on which the application is run. Please see the documentation of these options for more information.

Compiling very large source files (several thousands of lines) using advanced optimizations such as -O3, -ipo and -openmp, may require substantially larger amounts of RAM.

Additional System Requirements for Eclipse*

·         Use of the Eclipse* Integrated Development Environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 has the following additional requirements:

o    Red Hat AS 2.1 Update 6

o    Mozilla* 1.4 Xft or higher or Firefox* 1.0

o    For users of the GTK* window system: version 2.2.1 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango) should be installed.

·         On Turbo Linux 10 and Red Hat 9.0 systems, the BEA* JRockit* JRE that is provided with the Intel support for Eclipse may not function properly, aborting unexpectedly. Another standard JRE can be substituted for use on these systems.

·         On SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IA-32 architecture systems, the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment support will not function properly if used with the GTK* window system. The Eclipse support requires a later version of GTK , version 2.2.1, than what is installed by default with this operating system. Note that upgrading the system to GTK version 2.2.1 is non-trivial.

·         Complete, fully functioning browser support in the Eclipse Integrated Development environment requires the installation of one of these browsers:

·         Mozilla 1.4 Xft or higher or Firefox 1.0

On systems where these browsers are not installed by default or available otherwise, such as on a SGI Propack 4 system, an alternate browser, e.g. Konqueror, can be used in the Eclipse Integrated Development environment. Within Eclipse, set it as the browser to be used by selecting Windows->Preferences->General->Web Browser and entering it as the external Web Browser. Note that such a browser cannot be designated as the internal Web Browser within Eclipse, and thus there will be no support available for internal web browsing with this configuration.