Ubuntu 6.06 To Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Performance Benchmarks: 10 Years Of Linux Performance
The C-Ray multi-threaded benchmark is one of the cases where GCC optimizations have boosted the generated code performance immensely.
Again, all of these benchmarks were done on the same dual socket AMD Opteron setup.
FFmpeg runs much faster with the newer Ubuntu LTS releases. The compiler flags were maintained throughout all testing with the only manual flags being set each time were CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS values of -O3 and -march=native.