How You Can Use the Intel® Fortran Compiler

The Intel® Fortran Compiler has the following variations:

The Intel® Fortran Compiler for 32-bit Applications is designed for IA-32 systems. The IA-32 compilations run on any IA-32 Intel processor and produce applications that run on IA-32 or Intel® EM64T systems. This compiler can optimize code for one or more Intel® IA-32 processors, such as Pentium® M, Pentium® 4, and Intel® Xeon™ processors.
Intel® Fortran Compiler for Intel® EM64T-based Applications is designed for Intel® EM64T systems. This compiler runs on Intel® EM64T systems and produces applications that run on IA-32 or Intel® EM64T systems.
The Intel® Fortran Compiler for Itanium® -based Applications is designed for Itanium architecture systems. This compiler runs on Itanium-based systems and produces Itanium-based applications. Itanium-based compilations can only operate on Itanium-based systems.

The command to invoke any of these compilers is ifort.

The Intel® Fortran Compiler has a variety of options that enable you to use the compiler features for higher performance of your application.

The Intel® Fortran Compiler enables your software to perform the best on Intel architecture-based computers. The compiler has several high-performance optimizations. Some of its features and benefits are:

What feature might you want to use?	How will this help you?
Support for Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2), and Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3)	Intel microarchitecture benefit.
Automatic vectorizer	Parallelism in your code achieved automatically.
Parallelization	Automatic generation of multithreaded code for loops. Shared memory parallel programming with OpenMP*.
Floating-point optimizations	Improved floating-point performance.
Data prefetching	Improved performance due to the accelerated data delivery.
Interprocedural optimizations	Better performance for larger applications.
Whole program optimization	Improved performance between modules in larger applications.
Profile-guided optimization	Improved performance based on profiling the frequently used procedures.
Processor dispatch	Use of the latest Intel architecture features while maintaining object code compatibility with previous generations of Intel® Pentium® processors.