LLVM/Clang vs. GCC On The ARM Cortex-A15 Preview

The latest ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks on Phoronix is an extension of the earlier compiler testing from this modern ARM CPU found on the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual within the Samsung Chromebook. In this round of performance testing, the LLVM/Clang compiler performance is compared to recent releases of the GNU Compiler Collection on this latest-generation ARM hardware.

From the Samsung Chromebook Exynos 5 Dual notebook running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but with Ubuntu 12.10 packages on top, the GCC 4.6.3, GCC 4.7.2, and GCC 4.8.0 SVN (20121008) compilers were compared to LLVM/Clang 3.0. These were the packages as found in the 12.10 Quantal archive. Unfortunately, there wasn't the stable Clang 3.1 release available and when attempting to build LLVM/Clang from source on the Cortex-A15 system it was resulting in broken binaries.

For the main ARM Cortex-A15 performance benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, see ARM Cortex-A15 vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3 vs. Intel x86 and Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast. Overall, this $250 ARM Samsung Chromebook continues to be a very compelling notebook with very decent performance and an interesting platform for Linux benchmarks.