I understand what you are saying, but switching over to a 3rd party, non open source compiler is risky, and ultimately against the opensource principles linux is built on. If you dont get the source code for it, then your linux distro shouldnt use it as a fundamental building block. I can see another SCO fiasco on the horizon...
Gentoo as a whole does not support icc in mass, even though icc is superior for INTEL compilation. I havent seen stats for other processors, but I would be willing to bet that the performance gains are much more minimal, and rewriting 1000's of ebuilds to work with a ultimately COMMERCIAL compiler for a single processor implemenation is alot of work and doesnt make much sense to me.
So your xmms opens 30% faster! Personally, I'd rather wait for the gcc folks to catch up. 3.5 is planning on including autovectorization which should drasticlly narrow the performance / optimization gap between icc.
So, overall, I see what youre saying, but I think it would be ultimately a bad idea to put the fate of a linux distro (and alot of initial work and possible rework) in the hands of a profit driven company... Who knows when Intel is going to hit dire straits and decide to milk everyone they can....
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