Intel Sandy Bridge Shapes Up On GCC 4.7 Compiler

Starting with C-Ray, which is always an interesting computationally intensive multi-threaded test, GCC 4.7 RC1 is significantly faster than the earlier GCC releases. While all four versions of GCC had built C-Ray with the same compiler flags, with GCC 4.7 RC1 the compiler produced a binary about 25% faster than the current GCC 4.6.3 stable release.

Smallpt, another multi-threaded path-tracer using OpenMP, was attempting to inch ahead with GCC 4.7 RC1.

The Dhrystone 2 performance in BYTE suffers a minor setback with GCC 4.7 RC1 compared to older releases that were faster.