Sun Studio 12 vs. GCC3 vs. GCC4 Benchmarks

Building SQLite with the different compilers had led to little difference in its relational database performance.

With Sun Studio 12, OpenSolaris 2008.11 has the power to now beat out Ubuntu Linux at the timed PHP compilation and GraphicsMagick tests, but that was not the case in the other tests. With LAME MP3 encoding, Sun Studio 12 was dramatically slower and it fell behind at Ogg encoding. In GnuPG and SQLite, the compiler made little difference.

Some of the Sun Studio slowdowns may be explained by a majority of the open-source projects targeting GCC as their compiler and catering their compiler flags to the GNU Compiler Collection with little or no optimizations for Sun Studio. At the same time, however, it is also worth noting the current stable series for GCC is 4.3. The BlastWave packages for GCC4 were at version 4.0.2, which is outdated and since then GCC has picked up support for SSE4 and various other features.

Sun Microsystems currently has some compiler engineers looking over these results, and if they have anything interesting to say, we will be sure to pass it on.