Sun Studio 12 vs. GCC3 vs. GCC4 Benchmarks

Sun Studio 12 came out to shine with the GraphicsMagick tests. Sun Studio 12 did a much better job than GCC on OpenSolaris at building and optimizing GraphicsMagick. In all of the OpenMP-based GraphicsMagick tests, using Sun Studio 12 had left to the best performance on this dual quad-core system. In every test, Sun Studio 12 was at least twice as fast, but in the image-sharpening test for instance, Sun Studio 12 was nearly four times faster than GCC 4.0.2. OpenMP support was added in GCC 4.2, which at least partially explains these numbers.