Quote Originally Posted by poke349 View Post
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.
You do realize that you can kinda get gcc for Windows (via Cygwin).

I'm not sure how that all works out (whether it's emulated or whatnot--again not a programmer), but suffice it to say that for someone such as yourself, you might be able to make heads or tails of it and be able to at least run tests/benchmarks with it to be able to tell.

And for like some, they'd like recompile the kernel, the compiler itself, etc...so...it's a whole new giant can of worms.

But it IS available.

And I HAVE used it (a very insy tinsy tiny wee bit) with g77 (GNU Fortran 77 compiler), nothing like what you're doing. (Not even remotely CLOSE to it).