Optimized Binaries Provide Great Benefits For Intel Haswell

GraphicsMagick, the popular open-source fork of ImageMagick, tends to always take advantage of the latest compiler optimizations with its CPU-intense image processing tasks. When setting -march=core-avx2 to take advantage of the new FMA, BMI, and FMI2 instruction sets introduced with Haswell, the gains are noticeable. When the GNU Compiler Collection is able to generate binaries with taking advantage of the new Haswell instructions, the gains are very noticeable.

For GraphicsMagick the performance change in going from core-avx-i (the Ivy Bridge level) to core-avx2 (Haswell) on the same CPU yields the biggest performance increases going back to the Nocona days.