GCC 4.6 Compiler Performance With AVX On Sandy Bridge

Regardless of compiler version or flags, the blowfish performance in John The Ripper was virtually unchanged.

The BYTE performance was also largely uninteresting for this compiler / AVX focus.

C-Ray is one of our favorite multi-threaded CPU tests, but this time around its results weren't too interesting besides a performance regression from GCC 4.3.5 to GCC 4.4.5 and its ray-tracing times being the same even when enabling the Core 2 / Core i7 / Sandy Bridge optimizations. It was not until enabling the AVX floating-point math support that this ray-tracing application really pulled ahead to deliver a 23% speed-up.