Hi,
We are just starting to use the Intel C++ Compiler—we were previously using VS 2008, but I switched to use VS 2013 instead (having it upgrade our project files automatically), and then switched to “Use Intel Compiler”. So far I have not tweaked any options at all, but everything compiles/runs nicely.
The main issue so far is that the binaries (DLLs and EXEs) are much larger when compiler with the Intel compiler. Our large DLLs (that does most of the work) tends to be about twice as big with Intel, whereas a small utility EXE program that calls the DLLs can be almost 6 times larger—it grows from 75,776 bytes to 436,736 bytes.
I have checked the “obvious” possible reasons—both versions link dynamically as far as I can see and there shouldn’t be any debug info in either file. I first thought that the Intel compiler might add debug symbols to the EXE anyway, but after having the linker generate a MAP file, it looks as if the CODE segment is much larger.
So—does anyone have a feeling for what might cause this difference in size? I have tried changing some of the options, but none seems to change the size of the output.
I’ve browsed through the forum (and the rest of the net as well), looking for solutions, but none of the possible causes (certain options) seems to apply here.
Also, the out-of-the box performance if Intel is about 2.5% slower than VS 2013—but this is before applying any Intel-specific optimizations. Our app does not do much number-crunching, though—so I’m not sure if we can benefit much from features such as vectorization…
The Compiler parameters in VS looks like:
/GS /W3 /Gy /Zc:wchar_t /I"..\..\Include" /I"..\..\ Base\Include" /Zi /O2 /Ob1 /Fd".\Release/" /D "WIN32" /D "NDEBUG" /D "_CONSOLE" /D "_VC80_UPGRADE=0x0600" /D "_MBCS" /GF /Zc:forScope /Gd /MD /Fa".\Release/" /EHa /nologo /Fo".\Release/" /Qprof-dir ".\Release\" /Fp".\Release/Dump.pch"
Thanks,
/Peter