GCC 4.6, LLVM/Clang 3.0, AMD Open64 Compiler Benchmarks

For those interested by last week's articles on the AMD Bulldozer benchmarks of the GCC, Open64, and LLVM/Clang compilers and the FX-8150 compiler tuning, but curious to know how the new LLVM/Clang 3.0 and other compilers perform on other processors, here's some new test results. These tests are looking at GCC 4.6, LLVM/Clang 3.0-RC1, and AMD Open64 compilers on Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Shanghai hardware.

The first release candidate of GCC 4.6.2, LLVM/Clang 3.0 RC1, and AMD Open64 4.2.5.2 were tested on these two non-Bulldozer setups. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set outside of each test's default flags were specifying the march/mtume option to native for taking advantage of each system's native features. GCC was built with --enable-checking=release and LLVM was built with --enable-optimized and --disable-assertions, to mirror release builds. The Open64 compiler was using the 64-bit binary provided by AMD. All other testing remained at the respective defaults.

The AMD Shanghai setup was a dual AMD Opteron 2384 quad-core (octal-core total) system with 4GB of RAM and a SATA HDD. The Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge setup had an i7-2630QM (quad-core with Hyper Threading), 8GB of RAM, and a Super Talent SSD. Both systems were running Ubuntu 11.10 (x86_64) with the Linux 3.0 kernel. Results for Open64 on Sandy Bridge were not available since the AMD-sponsored compiler failed to build working binaries for any of the tests.

Now let's see the results.