Many of these extensions were adopted by the SYCL 2020 provisional specification[8] including unified shared memory, group algorithms, and sub-groups.

Intel announced in August 2021 the complete adoption of LLVM for faster build times and benefits from supporting the latest C++ standards.

[5] The Intel compiler provides debugging information that is standard for the common debuggers (DWARF 2 on Linux, similar to gdb, and COFF for Windows).

Previous versions of Intel’s C/C++ compilers have been criticized for optimizing less aggressively for non-Intel processors; for example, Steve Westfield wrote in a 2005 article at the AMD website:[13] Intel 8.1 C/C++ compiler uses the flag -xN (for Linux) or -QxN (for Windows) to take advantage of the SSE2 extensions.

The reason is that the compiler or library can make multiple versions of a piece of code, each optimized for a certain processor and instruction set, for example SSE2, SSE3, etc.

This has allegedly led to misleading benchmarks,[14] including one incident when changing the CPUID of a VIA Nano significantly improved results.

Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.As late as 2013, an article in The Register alleged that the object code produced by the Intel compiler for the AnTuTu Mobile Benchmark omitted portions of the benchmark which showed increased performance compared to ARM platforms.

[20] The following lists versions of the Intel C++ Compiler since 1999:[21] VS2008 support: command line only in this release.