A case study on compiler optimizations for the Intel® Core™ 2 duo processor

The complexity of modern processors poses increasingly more difficult challenges to software optimization. Modern optimizing compilers have become essential tools for leveraging the power of recent processors by means of high-level optimizations to exploit multi-core platforms and single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, as well as advanced code generation to deal with microarchitectural performance aspects. Using the Intel®Core™2 Duo processor and Intel Fortran/C++ compiler as a case study, this paper gives a detailed account of the sort of optimizations required to obtain high performance on modern processors.