Intel Ivy Bridge: GCC 4.8 vs. LLVM/Clang 3.2 SVN

Kicking off the Linux benchmarks this weekend are some early numbers from the GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 development compilers when running on Intel's latest-generation Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor. GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 are still months away from being formally released, but this article provides a glimpse at how the open-source compiler battle is panning out.

This brief look at the latest development versions of Clang and GCC were being done from a CompuLab Intense-PC with an Intel Core i7 3517UE "Ivy Bridge" processor and the system being loaded with a recent development build of Ubuntu 12.10 but with an updated graphics stack and an early build of the Linux 3.6 kernel.

GCC and LLVM and Clang were checked out of their respective mainline SVN repositories on 17 August 2012. GCC and LLVM/Clang were built in their release/optimized builds without assertions. The same compiler flags were used when building out the test profiles for each compiler release. Tests comparing GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 to their earlier released versions will be conducted in a future Phoronix article.