Compiler performances...

First, I'd like to say that I'm not English or American or anything that speaks English fluently so, please forgive me for the mistakes I will make. (or maybe did I already make some)
But don't worry about answering, I'll manage to understand somehow.
Oh, and I do know it is very formal to speak like that but I'm still at school so I speak like I've been taught to.

Well, so I wanted to ask if anyone could tell me about the compilers, especially, the performances.
Which one produces the fastest binaries under Windows?
But the true question is about the not that known ICL (or ICC if you use *nix) that people say makes incredibly fast code maybe as fast as the hand-coded assembly.
Is that true? And do it only work on Intel's processors? I believe no but perhaps... But if it indeed works on other Intel compatible processors, is the difference in speed that big?

Thanks for replying.

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Originally posted by lyx
But the true question is about the not that known ICL (or ICC if you use *nix) that people say makes incredibly fast code maybe as fast as the hand-coded assembly.
Thanks for replying.

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I belive that nowdays the compilers can easily create a better code than a human. This is because some computer architectures are made specially to have a good compiler, and not to a human program directly assembly.
And about the difference between compilers... I think that there is not any big difference...
Hope that undertsand!

I'm sure humans can do better coding than machine because at least, compilers were made but humans so it wouldn't make sense to say that no human is capable of such a thing.
But I think it is hard to do so, mainly because of some tricky optimizations that compilers use like reorganization of the code to take full advantage of the architecture, which, done by an human, makes the code written quite tough to read afterward.
Anyway, I know that there aren't much differences between the compilers... (except for the case you make a application that needs an incredible amonth of calculations like a compression utility or a high level maths processing one) Though, I'd just like to know about that compiler. Perhaps, that much speed isn't needed anywhere at present, yet it remains very interesting technicaly, as a powerful, almost perfect if we believe what they say on the website, tool.