AMD AOCC 3.2 vs. GCC vs. Clang Compiler Performance On Zen 3

GCC 12 in particular is looking very good for AMD Zen 3. GCC 12 is still under development (stage 4) and is being buttoned up for release around the usual March~April timeframe. GCC 12.1 will be the first stable GCC 12 release and is looking quite good at this stage while more AMD/Intel/AArch64 GCC 12 benchmarks will come when the release nears. For many of the workloads tested, AOCC 3.2 was within a few percent of the upstream LLVM/Clang performance.

Most users will likely be fine running the upstream GCC or LLVM Clang compilers especially as they are fully open-source and readily available across distributions rather than relying upon the binary-only AOCC to which would be nicer if there was a source tree for AMD's Optimizing C/C++ changes and would help in tracking possible patches for upstreaming into LLVM. Obviously if running performance-sensitive workloads on your system it's worthwhile investigating how each compiler performs for those particular codebases but hopefully this article offers some general guidance over the current AOCC/GCC/Clang state on Zen 3.