Questions About Intel's Fortran Compiler

There was a link to this in The Inquirer, this morning. I found it interesting.

It seems Intel's compiler for Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 produces code that looks for the Intel trademark and if it doesn't find it, refuses to enable several optimizations, regardless of whether or not the chip it does find is capable of using them or not. Note that this is NOT the usual cpuid routine, but something hidden. The code so produced runs much more slowly or segfaults on AMD processors.

The "bug" has been fixed, but the compiler still does not use cpuid for identifying the processor. Intel claims it was a mistake. Various observers label it a dirty trick. Read it and make up your own mind.

Jack