PathScale EKOPath 5.0 Beta Compiler Performance

Going on two years ago PathScale open-sourced their EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite. This Fortran/C/C++ compiler suite hasn't seen widespread adoption since then outside of some scientific circles and other select high-performance areas, but PathScale hasn't stalled in advancing their compiler software that is also still available commercially. PathScale has been preparing to release EKOPath 5.0, which is the subject of today's benchmarks.

Working on some recent compiler tests, I noticed that via PathScale's web-site they now have EKOPath 5 in beta. Up to that point I hadn't seen or heard anything at all about EKOPath 5. From some Google queries, it seems not many people either have heard yet about EKOPath 5. Details on EKOPath 5 are scarce and I haven't heard from PathScale Inc yet about the changes, but they do continue to produce daily build images (though URL wrangling is still required to get the latest binaries). The product page that is promoting EKOPath 5 Beta advertises the features as being Intel 64 & AMD64 performance tuned, ISO C99/C++2003/C++11 & GNU compatible, Fortran 90/95/2003/2008, and industry-proven robustness and quality.

Curious about the EKOPath 5 compiler beta, I ran a few benchmarks on this latest compiler suite out of PathScale. Using the 2013-02-05 daily image of PathScale 5.0 Beta, the compiler's generated binary performance was compared to PathScale 4.0.12.1 (December 2011 release), GCC 4.7.2, GCC 4.8.0 2013-01-21, and LLVM/Clang 3.2.

Initial benchmarking of PathScale EKOPath 5 happened from an Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.