What Version of Visual Studio Works with Intel Fortran

[schulzey]

Hi, how do I find out which versions of Visual Studio work with version 2020 update 4 of Intel Parallel Studio XE Prof for Fortran Windows? Is it documented somewhere?

[Steve_Lionel · Accepted solution]

It is - Intel® Compilers compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio* and...  Linked in the FAQ that is one of the sticky topics in this forum.

[schulzey]

Great, thanks for that, found it.

Just a follow up question - Seeing as the Parallel Studio XE Fortran 2020 Update 4 compiler came out back in October 2020, is it still being developed?

[Steve_Lionel]

No. The oneAPI compiler now called "ifort Classic" is the most recent version of that compiler. Old compilers do not get updates.

[Ron_Green]

There will be no further Parallel Studio XE releases.  

The ifort front end parser is shared with IFX - MOSTLY.  So there are some updates in each oneAPI ifort versions.  You will see the minor version increasing ("x") in ifort 2021.x.  However, everything after the parsing is not changing - high level loop opts, vectorization, IPO, PGO, code gen and support for processors is frozen.  ifort Processor support is what is supported and tuned for today's processor families.  Of course this code generation will WORK on future processors but it may not be tuned to take advantage of any future hardware advances, like new instruction sets.  ifort supports and has some tuning for Sapphire Rapids but that is the last new processor it will be tuned for. 

IFX will get the tuning for everything after Sapphire Rapids, and any tuning we may find for that processor as we gain more experience with that hardware.

[Ron_Green]

Ah, forgot to mention - IFX and IFORT share the same Integrations into Visual Studio.  So ifort will support the latest updates to Visual Studio.   Like yesterday, we released 2022.1.3 for Windows since MS updated VS 2022 and broke our compiler.  So we had to fix for the new VS patch and do an update release.  This you will continue to see as we go forward with ifort and ifx.

Similarly, for linux we will support new versions of our supported OSes, their new glibc versions, etc.   

This way you can continue to use ifort going forward as Windows, Linux, Visual Studio change over the coming years.