In November 2023, Intel announced the deprecation and eventual removal of ifort. Towards the end of 2024 Intel will no longer provide ifort in our packages, starting with the release version 2025.0 Intel® HPC Toolkits and Fortran compiler component downloads. An implication of this removal is that ifort version 2021.13 is the final build for ifort. This appears in the Intel® HPC Toolkit version 2024.2.0 and the current Intel Fortran component downloads.
There are a lot of details about who can download what and for how long, which ifort version is the last build, and going forward with ifx. Please read the blog post for all the relevant details. This blog post does not allow comments. Because of this, for comments or questions from the community I have opened a post on our Intel Fortran Community Forum. This post on the Forum does allow comments or questions.
It has been a good long run for ifort, and you can still download the last build of ifort for some limited amount of time. We look forward to a similar good run for many, many more years with our Intel® Fortran Compiler, (ifx).
ifx has come a long way. Hopefully this means even more focus on ifx and even more advancements in || performance. Is there a published roadmap of near-term ifx milestones?
@greenrongreen I have a question. Does Intel have some internal extensions to LLVM to provide higher-optimized backend code for Intel chips, or will ifx generate roughly equivalent code in the backend like other LLVM-based Fortran compilers?
So the differentiating feature will be higher-level optimizations in ifx, before LLVM code generation?
Thank you, Ron and the Intel team, for your remarkably accessible state-of-the-art software products. I want to highlight that the ifx (IFX) 2024.0.2 20231213 compiler version that I have on my system cannot compile some interoperability features of C and Fortran correctly. Even though binaries are generated, they crash. The same does not happen with the same ifort version.
Have there been newer releases of ifx than what I have on my system to test for this bug?
Some people told me that some softwares misbehave when built with ifx (vasp and castep).
I am not sure about castep, but with vasp It runs well after I built it for him with ifort instead of ifx.
Maybe is too early to drop it.
there were some issues with older versions of ifx. like any software, it improves over time. vasp is working with the latest ifx AFAIK… Not sure about castep but you can contact the developers to see if they have tested and recommend a specific version of ifx.
I work for a Government agency that uses ifort for astrodynamics calculations. We have relied on the Intel’s Fortran compiler for 20+ years. It’s been fast and accurate. When we heard the news of ifx, we have tested it every release, and it’s been slower and not as accurate as ifort. It’s been improving over the years, but even the current release is slower and less accurate. So, we will remain on our latest version of oneAPI, until ifx is proven to be as fast and accurate as ifort.
Yes, I too still see issues with ifx, even with the latest 2025 release. @greenrongreen I just submitted one bug report to Intel (Support Request 06420700).
Unfortunately, we are also facing compilation / runtime errors with the latest IFX. I ended up uninstalling the latest IFX to revive the old ifort installation. It’s unclear at this stage whether these are programmer errors or compiler bugs, but given that both ifort and gfortran can compile and run the code flawlessly, I suspect it is still an outstanding issue with IFX.
However, I do note significant improvements in the latest IFX release. The previous IFX version generated several ICE here and there in the codebase that are resolved in the latest release.
I don’t know what OS env you are using but in Linux, you can easily have both. They install in separate trees under /opt/intel. The only thing which is possibly tricky is to set up the environment properly, you will probably be unable to use both old ifort and new ifx in the same terminal session, but this is not a big deal.
True on Linux. On Windows, I ended up removing the new installation and reinstalling (repairing) the old version because the vtune and some other Intel software products had changed under the new version install. There may be a better way, of course, just like the Linux setup. IFX binary-builds for some applications crash at runtime. It’s challenging to reproduce the errors in a minimal source code when the original code is thousands of lines. That makes bug reporting for IFX quite tedious and time-intensive for me.