XE 2018 Update 4 version

[Rene_Blankenburg]

Just to clarify it: I installed the today released Update 4 of XE Studio 2018. It is shown as Update 4 in the software environment as well. But the Visual Studio integration reports 18.0.5. Which one is correct? Thank you!

[Lorri_M_Intel]

Yes, this is correct, and yes, i can see the confusion.

The compiler piece, and only the compiler piece, of PSXE 2018 had a special update in-between PSXE 2018 Update 3 and PSXE 2918 Update 4, so the compiler update number became misaligned.

           Bottom line, your installation is good.

                                   --Lorri

[TimP]

I just got the email announcement, but the download button there didn't appear to work.  I opened up ISM, and the latest updates don't appear there.  registrationcenter has a beta section at the top with "no downloads yet"  and a 2019 initial release, but no 2018.  So it's a mystery how this is to be distributed.

After a half hour, the download from the email started, with an estimated time of 17 hrs.  Now it's nearing 1% complete and showing 3 hrs.  I guess there's a reason you used to sneak releases out late Friday night.  Lately the servers were able to deliver a high enough rate (>4Mb/s) to justify us who can having a wired internet connection, but not today.

40% done "network error"    RESUME "resuming in 50 minutes"

"software.intel.com too long responding"

Tried doing online installation in parallel with full download and install.  The latter is much faster, but ends up saying I will encounter one or more issue described at https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-development-tools-integration-to-vs2017-issue  (and I have the earliest available versions of VS2015 and 2017, which seem to be preferred).

[TimP]

After all that, my basic tests of ifort (f77&f03), icl(c.c++,cean) went uneventfully, with few significant changes in result.

In one case, explicit unroll and jam seemed to kill performance now, where it used to give a significant gain.  That sort of issue has been around forever, as where compilers used to perform reroll  optimization (undo the explicit unroll and start over under the covers).  So it's better not to be cute with optimizations which aren't important enough to check out for each compiler update.

[mecej4]

For several hours, the release notes for 18.0.4 were identical to the release notes for 18.0.3! Later, the new version appeared, and after reading the new notes I did not see sufficient reasons for a Fortran user to spend the time and network consumption to update from 18.0.3 to 18.0.4.

[andrew_4619]

mecej4 wrote:
I did not see sufficient reasons for a Fortran user to spend the time and network consumption to update from 18.0.3 to 18.0.4.

I would agree with that thinking but to add a point of note...

There are NO fortran compiler changes at all listed in the update notes for  2018 Update 1,  Update 2,  Update 3 or  Update 4!!!!!!! But I do not actually believe this as there are I think some bug fixes applied. Unfortunately these have ZERO visibility for users these days which I don't thing is very friendly.