Err, I just gave the German distributor a call and this is what they claimed: KAI is a frontend-only compiler, it uses GCC or another C-compiler as backend. (?)
Are you sure they're not talking about another KAI product, "Visual KAP". This is a preprocessor which automatically parallizes source code (and also performs some source-level optimizations even for serial codes) before passing it along to another compiler. It's not really a 'compiler' in and of itself, though. You'd require another compiler as a backend. (That product is about to be discontinued, by the way.) What seems to be happening (and is good news) is that the Intel compiler is slowly transforming from a "rebadged" EPC compiler (with Intel-tweaked) back-end to a KAI/EPC hybrid (with what appears to be a new back-end for IA64 (that or they did a LOT of work on an existing one) - the reason I spoke about "GCC front-end" is that the Intel compiler is doing a pretty decent job as a chameleon - on Windows, it acts just like Microsoft's Visual C++ and on Linux, it makes a pretty decent stab at acting like GCC. It's not enough to let you build a kernel, but it's pretty good! Duraid