I am doing some numerical optimization on a scientific application. One thing I noticed is that GCC will optimize the call pow(a,2) by compiling it into a*a, but the call pow(a,6) is not optimized and will actually call the library function pow, which greatly slows down the performance. (In contrast, Intel C++ Compiler, executable icc, will eliminate the library call for pow(a,6).)

What I am curious about is that when I replaced pow(a,6) with a*a*a*a*a*a using GCC 4.5.1 and options "-O3 -lm -funroll-loops -msse4", it uses 5 mulsd instructions:

movapd  %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13

while if I write (a*a*a)*(a*a*a), it will produce

movapd  %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm14, %xmm13
mulsd   %xmm13, %xmm13

which reduces the number of multiply instructions to 3. icc has similar behavior.

Why do compilers not recognize this optimization trick?