Intel® oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler Developer Guide and Reference

ID 767253
Date 7/13/2023
Public

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Document Table of Contents

O

Specifies the code optimization for applications.

Syntax

Linux:

-O[n]

Windows:

/O[n]

Arguments

n

Is the optimization level. Possible values are 1, 2, or 3. On Linux* systems, you can also specify 0.

Default

O2

Optimizes for code speed. This default may change depending on which other compiler options are specified. For details, see below.

Description

This option specifies the code optimization for applications.

Option

Description

O (Linux*)

This is the same as specifying O2.

O0 (Linux)

Disables all optimizations.

This option may set other options. This is determined by the compiler, depending on which operating system and architecture you are using. The options that are set may change from release to release.

O1

Enables optimizations for speed and disables some optimizations that increase code size and affect speed.
To limit code size, this option:

  • Enables global optimization; this includes data-flow analysis, code motion, strength reduction and test replacement, split-lifetime analysis, and instruction scheduling.

  • Disables inlining of some intrinsics.

This option may set other options. This is determined by the compiler, depending on which operating system and architecture you are using. The options that are set may change from release to release.

The O1 option may improve performance for applications with very large code size, many branches, and execution time not dominated by code within loops.

O2

Enables optimizations for speed. This is the generally recommended optimization level.
Vectorization is enabled at O2 and higher levels.

This option also enables:

  • Inlining of intrinsics

  • Intra-file interprocedural optimization, which includes:

    • inlining

    • constant propagation

    • forward substitution

    • routine attribute propagation

    • variable address-taken analysis

    • dead static function elimination

    • removal of unreferenced variables

  • The following capabilities for performance gain:

    • constant propagation

    • copy propagation

    • dead-code elimination

    • global register allocation

    • global instruction scheduling and control speculation

    • loop unrolling

    • optimized code selection

    • partial redundancy elimination

    • strength reduction/induction variable simplification

    • variable renaming

    • exception handling optimizations

    • tail recursions

    • peephole optimizations

    • structure assignment lowering and optimizations

    • dead store elimination

This option may set other options, especially options that optimize for code speed. This is determined by the compiler, depending on which operating system and architecture you are using. The options that are set may change from release to release.

This content does not apply to SYCL.
On Linux systems, the -debug inline-debug-info option will be enabled by default if you compile with optimizations (option -O2 or higher) and debugging is enabled (option -g).

Many routines in the shared libraries are more highly optimized for Intel® microprocessors than for non-Intel microprocessors.

O3

Performs O2 optimizations and enables more aggressive loop transformations such as Fusion, Block-Unroll-and-Jam, and collapsing IF statements.

This option may set other options. This is determined by the compiler, depending on which operating system and architecture you are using. The options that are set may change from release to release.

The O3 optimizations may not cause higher performance unless loop and memory access transformations take place. The optimizations may slow down code in some cases compared to O2 optimizations.

The O3 option is recommended for applications that have loops that heavily use floating-point calculations and process large data sets.

Many routines in the shared libraries are more highly optimized for Intel® microprocessors than for non-Intel microprocessors.

The last O option specified on the command line takes precedence over any others.

IDE Equivalent

Visual Studio: Optimization > Optimization

Eclipse: General > Optimization Level

Alternate Options

O0

Linux: None
Windows: /Od

See Also