I’ve been messing around with Intel’s C/C++ compiler and so far I’ve been fairly impressed. In every test I’ve ran it outperforms its GCC and MSVC counterparts.
These benchmarks were ran on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 (64-bit).
The first benchmark I did was on a lengthy song. This let me see the overall gains in performance easier than if it were a shorter song, which you’ll see later.
Compiler Arguments Real Time Play/CPU MSVC2005 (x64) --preset standard 1:56 14.614x ICC (x64) --preset standard 1:51 15.241x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset standard 1:44 16.373x MSVC2005 (x64) --preset extreme 1:50 15.487x ICC (x64) --preset extreme 1:45 16.244x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset extreme 1:38 17.347x MSVC2005 (x64) --preset insane 1:28 19.186x ICC (x64) --preset insane 1:25 19.905x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset insane 1:20 21.080x
The performance gains were an average of 11.26%. This is pretty decent for a 28-minute song. If you were to encode an entire album then you would see this increase pay off some.
This next song is a little bit longer in length than your average song at almost six minutes, but it’s short enough that it makes a good test.
Compiler Arguments Real Time Play/CPU MSVC2005 (x64) --preset standard 0:21 16.458x ICC (x64) --preset standard 0:20 17.054x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset standard 0:19 18.320x MSVC2005 (x64) --preset extreme 0:21 16.839x ICC (x64) --preset extreme 0:20 17.556x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset extreme 0:18 18.744x MSVC2005 (x64) --preset insane 0:18 19.156x ICC (x64) --preset insane 0:17 19.791x ICC w/Profiling (x64) --preset insane 0:16 21.000x
It may not seem like the performance increased much since the times are so close together, but it’s still an average increase of 13.23%.
It doesn’t really require too much effort to compile LAME using Intel’s compiler, and the benefits from it are worth it.
Specific versions used: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 v8.0.50727.762 (SP.050757-7600) Intel C++ Compiler v10.1.025
NASM v2.06rc1
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