June 08, 2013 -- While the Intel Haswell CPUs were just launched days ago, there's already quite a Linux story to them. The Haswell CPU is interesting and the performance is good, but there's still extra headroom to make especially when it comes to the graphics driver and performance relative to Intel's Windows driver. Even so, the Intel Haswell Linux support has already evolved a great deal.

May 25, 2013 -- In preparation for the upcoming release of LLVM 3.3, here is an extensive round of C/C++ benchmarks from GCC 4.8.0, LLVM Clang 3.2, and LLVM Clang 3.3-rc1 to look at the Linux compiler performance. Benchmarks happened from three different systems bearing Intel Core i7 3960X, AMD FX-8350, and Intel Core i3 3217U processors for a diverse look at the performance.

May 17, 2013 -- Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

May 13, 2013 -- With the merge window on the feature-rich Linux 3.10 kernel having been closed, the usual roundabout of Phoronix benchmarking of the Linux kernel has commenced. In our initial testing of the F2FS file-system on Linux 3.10, however, yields negative performance changes.

May 07, 2013 -- One of the prominent features to be introduced with the LLVM 3.3 release this summer is the SLP Vectorizer. Introduced in the LLVM 3.2 release was the LLVM Loop Vectorizer for vectorizing loops while the new SLP Vectorizer is about optimizing straight-line code by merging multiple scalars into vectors.

April 27, 2013 -- Most often when delivering new compiler benchmarks on Phoronix whether it be for GCC, LLVM/Clang, or an alternative Linux code compiler, the testing is most commonly done with Intel hardware. The Intel compiler testing is done since Intel CPUs are predominantly used in the developer world and we happen to have a lot more Intel hardware samples around than AMD CPUs. However, for those curious how the LLVM/Clang 3.3 performance is stacking up, here are some GCC and LLVM/Clang benchmarks from an AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" system running Ubuntu 13.04 Linux.

April 23, 2013 -- Generally when delivering new Linux compiler benchmarks on Phoronix it's from x86/ARM hardware within the past two years. It's the most recent generations of hardware that excites us the most and generally where the professional Linux software developers are focusing their time and resources. However, after seeing the recent LLVM/Clang 3.3 performance improvements for this forthcoming open-source compiler release, we decided to go back a bit in CPU history.

April 19, 2013 -- Last month I delivered benchmarks showing LLVM/Clang 3.3 offers performance improvements and then LLVM/Clang 3.3 is very competitive to GCC 4.8. For further confirming this information, LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN development benchmarks were carried out from an entirely different system to confirm the earlier findings. LLVM/Clang 3.3 is indeed much faster over its predecessor in a wide variety of Linux benchmarks.

April 15, 2013 -- The Liquorix kernel is a modified version of the Linux kernel with out-of-tree patches and a kernel configuration that is highly-optimized for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. It's been one year since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel against a vanilla Linux kernel, but now we have some benchmarks of the Liquorix 3.8 kernel compared to the latest stable Linux kernel.

April 07, 2013 -- Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It's interesting.