Quote Originally Posted by Boogerlad View Post
is the vs2010 sp1 compiler faster in sse4.2 as well compared to the intel compiler? It would simplify my build script for open source emulators a lot.
I haven't used SSE4.2. It's mostly string-processing stuff - which isn't that useful for computation-heavy apps.

But for SSE4.1 and down, it is very very close. The Intel compiler is less than 1% faster than VS 2010 SP1 for y-cruncher.
At this point, it'll depend heavily on the type of code you're doing.

y-cruncher has a lot of very large blocks of branchless straight-line code. (often more than > 1000 instructions)
This is pretty typical of HPC apps.

Visual Studio has always sucked for this type of code.
The Intel Compiler has always been pretty good - if it's done right.
GCC seems to be competitive with the Intel Compiler - but it's hard to compare since it's Windows vs. Linux.

But now I'm tempted to think that VS2010 SP1 is much better at optimizing this type of code. Though I'm gonna need to run some benchmarks to see for sure.